A Hot Wheels model among siblings. The stack of baseball cards between friends on the playground. Or that first Funko Pop! swap at your very first convention.

So we’re excited at Pop Price Guide and hobbyDB to announce that we’re bringing back the thrill of trading. Our latest new Premium feature is one that we’ve aspired to for quite some time now with an option to Trade joining the ability to Buy and Sell via PPG.

Ready to give it a try?

How to put items for Trade

Choose how to sell.  Now have options –

Set your Trading Terms in Settings under the Selling & Trading tab.

Your listings will then look like this –

You can also list items for trade from your Collection Management and add Trade to items that you already marked for sale – in both case by using the Batch Actions  –

Here for example select the items that are listed for sale and add Trade as another way of offering these to other members.

Finalizing a Deal

Once a deal is agreed both parties can transfer items to their new trading partner.

Transferring can also be done from Items for Sale as a bulk action (so all traded items at the same time). That transfers with the item to the other member and adds them to a list called Incoming Transfers (i.e. it helps to remember that you have traded and that has not yet arrived with you).

Find items for Trade!

You can find items for Trade in the Marketplace as well as in the Database.

Plus, if an item on your Wish List comes up for Trade, you’ll receive an email notification.

Vouching

An important facet of collecting is trust. hobbyDB now allows its members to “vouch” for fellow collectors and share positive experiences. Think a Pop Price Guide member is fab? Tell them! Find more details here, then look for this feature located on your PPG Showcase.

More to Come

We plan to show both Collectibles owned by Members and items in their Wish List in the Database (unless marked private). That way you can check who owns an item you want and see what they are craving for and offer a deal and never pay PPG an incremental fee!

This is a Premium Feature

This helps us to make sure your counterparty is a bona fide member and also enables us to offer this service for no incremental cost. You can trade as much as you like.

Can we make this better? We love to hear from you. Tell us in the comments below.

hobbyDB Premium is a new offering that helps enhance your collecting experience while supporting hobbyDB as a whole. Prices start at as little as $2.50 a month and you’ll enjoy no ads, your Showcase including the value of your collection and your Top Ten, unlimited selling and trading with zero hobbyDB fees and much more. Check it out here.

The post Back to the Roots – Trading Now on Pop Price Guide appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

Ever since introducing Subvariants (we now have 58,556 of them!) you could find your exact item.  But it required to go to a new page to see them and compare  –

So we decided that it was time to get to the information faster  –

Then you get this  –

One of the new features is the ability to add to your collection directly from the new-look Search pages. This makes it way easier and much faster to add items to your collection or to your Wish List or to Buy or Sell it or Rate it from search results!

Big thanks to Cerulian, one of our super squad member, as this is based on an idea she pitched

The post Add to Your Collection Directly from Pop Price Guide Subvariant Pages appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

Why did you do this?

• Simply put, as a business, we need to make revenue to survive. Earlier this year, Funko told us that they could not afford paying for our pricing data anymore and that they would get price data from eBay instead – and that was our biggest contract. 

• We tried to compensate with ads and other initiatives, but nothing was able to make up for that loss. 

• You tell us about inflation, believe us, we know. Our costs have continued to rise including all of our suppliers for technical services (our biggest expense category – and what keeps the site online)

• On top of that, our entire team has not received a pay increase for the last three years. We are so passionate about what we are building, that we have made that sacrifice in order to continue doing what we love – which makes a lot of this negativity really discouraging.  

Why don’t you charge for new services instead of old ones?

When we launched HobbyDB Premium, that’s exactly what we did. We charged for – 

• No Ads

• No Selling Fees (compare that to other sites!)

• Collection Exports

• Gains and Losses Reports

• First Access to Exclusives

And guess what, we got less than 300 subscribers (that is 0.04%). This is not enough to help us survive.  We would need just 1% of our Members to come on board.

Why add more costs when everyone is struggling with inflation

• We are struggling with inflation too. All of our costs have gone up considerably and we need help in order to survive as a business.

• We specifically made subscriptions as affordable as possible. $2.50 a month is less than a cup of coffee these days and will certainly not get hobbyDB rich quick. 

What about our Volunteers

• They are excluded from this change

• If you want to actively help build the database reach out and become a volunteer

What about our Shareholders

• Shareholders get a 25% discount on Premium

• Think about it this way, if you own shares in Netflix, do you still have to pay to use their monthly service? 

What is OK and what is not

• You can use the free service or close your account

• Sending our team members an email that says 50x “Fuck you” is neither eloquent nor really acceptable (manners matter)

Lastly, thanks to the many people who send positive vibes or have become a Premium Member already.

Alex, Christian, and the rest of the team

The post You had Questions about our new Premium Membership appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

A Letter to Our Community – 

Ten years ago, we founded hobbyDB with a mission to document every collectible ever made. Next, we added the price guide, collection management, and the marketplace, all tools to help foster your love of collecting. And, best of all, then came you – our community, without whom we would never have come this far. Together we have built a resource that now catalogs almost 1,000,000 collectibles, 6,059,595 price points and is a digital home for 700,000 collectors! 

Over the last 10 years, we have been grateful to be able to offer these services on hobbyDB and PPG for free to the entire community. But, as with any business, our goal is to have the resources to continue making the site better over time. As many of you know, hobbyDB earns its income from ads. Some are great, like the ones that show you things like spare parts or protectors. Others can be more annoying (like those video ads). While we could add more ads to increase our resources, when it comes down to the overall site experience, we think that would just take all of the fun out of using both hobbyDB and PPG. And would be a huge disservice to the community.

As you may have seen, last month we launched hobbyDB Premium – a subscription service that is built to make your hobbyDB experience better than ever. And, as you’ll see if you’re already a Premium member, we started by removing ads entirely to give you a faster, uninterrupted site experience, removing marketplace fees so when you make a sale you have more cash in your pocket, and adding the ability to export your collection so you can always have a physical record of your collection on hand.

So Here’s Our Next Biggest Change

On Monday, we will be transitioning the Showcase to be a Premium feature. This will include your collection value, your top ten, and the ability to share your collection or wish list publicly.

We understand that this may come as a shock initially. If we had the choice, we would obviously love to be able to offer all of our services for free, forever. But if we want to be able to grow into the site that we know we can be, we can’t just depend on ad revenue alone.

Let us be clear, access to the database and the price guide will remain free. And, you will still be able to manage your collection or wish list in your Collection Management dashboard. If you do not decide to become a Premium member before Monday, your Showcase will still be available when/if you decide to sign up in the future. Nothing will be edited or deleted by us.

As the database would not survive without our amazing Squad, all Active Squad members will continue to be able to use their Showcase and all related features without a Premium Membership.

When it comes to the monthly subscription price, we went as low as possible, beginning at $4.99 per month. To save more, you can also sign up for three months of Premium for $9.99 (which works out to only $3.33 a month), or a year of Premium for $29.99 (which is only $2.50 per month)! If you’re ready to super charge your experience – sign up here.

We did not take this decision lightly. But we know this decision will help us get more resources to be able to build more features to make the site better over time. As you may know, we have always had SUCH a small team. This will allow us to be able to hire more developers so that your requested features can happen faster and get some user experience help so that the site is easier to use and always improving.

Here are some Premium features to come over the next 12 months:

1. Active Trading – The ability to offer an item in your collection for trade.
2. Passive Trading 1 – See who has an item and be able to reach out to them
3. Passive Trading 2 – See who has an item on their Wish List and be able to reach out to them
4. Collection PDF printout (80 items per page). Collection CSV download is already available
5. Wish List Export & PDF printout (80 items per page)
6. List Estimated Values – See how much a segment of your items is worth
7. Combine Estimated Values Charts – Select any number of items and compare their values over time
8. Collectible Storage Management – Define your own locations and then choose from them
9. Advanced Search – Search over descriptions
10. “The Completeness Test” – See which items in a Series are on your Wish List and are available for trade or purchase. You will also be able to mark items you do not care about as “I do not want” and then not see them again (unless you change)

And for all hobbyDB members –

1. Estimated values for graded and loose items
2. Better app usability and integration
3. More Price Sources, more automatic Price Point Assignment (where safely possible), better tools for our volunteers
4. Creation of a new field called “Exclusive to”. This will allow you to easily find all your Target or Hard Rock Cafe Boston items

Ready to be a Premium member? Sign up here.

We want to say thank you again for all of your support. We know this is a big change, and we hope that this will ensure that we can continue to grow and provide the best service possible for our loyal community. We’re always open to feedback, please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

The post A New Phase for Pop Price Guide and hobbyDB Begins Monday appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

Within the last few days, the incredible Squad has added the 900,000th item to the database. That’s hundreds of thousands of your favorite collectibles including 46,000 Funko products.

We’re also thrilled to announce that we’ve eclipsed more than 6,000,000 in price points for those 900,000 items! And that we now support 82 different sources for Prices.  This makes us the largest price guides on the web run by real collectors, rather than robots.

Over the past few years, a lot of things have changed when it comes to how we populate the Pop Price Guide.

We know that these changes have had a somewhat negative result when it comes to keeping the price guide as up-to-date as possible. Some of our Estimated Values are not as good as they once were, so we just have to fix it!  

And here is our plan

• Our Shopify Integration is almost complete. This will allow auto-assigning sales from Shopify Stores (and we have about 20 Funko stores in the pipeline, including some that sell a wide variety of older Pops).
  
• We will explore using the API for StockX and other ways to make it easier to add eBay and Mercari Price Points.
  
• Continue our discussions with Whatnot that could lead to us developing a Whatnot-related Chrome Extension. This will allow a screenshot and a price capture that we can assign from a Whatnot auction – we will continue to only do that for high visibility channels
  
• Adding more auction houses as price sources like we do with Pristine Auctions (for example adding Zobi prices).
  
• Build more tools to make it easier for our volunteers to see Funko products that have not had a Price Point for 3 months or longer.
  
• Most importantly in the short term  –  work with Isaac AKA Pops Galore & More (one of the volunteers, lead investor in our current Crowdfunding and frequent advisor to the hobbyDB team) to catch up with a lot of that list (special thanks here also for Darius from ToyCabal for his suggestions).

With all of these solutions in place, we expect the Price Guide to be in much better shape by the end of July. 

In order to do this and everything else we do we need your help. 

Our vision is to get to 100,000 Squad Members (we stand at 2,409). The Squad is our life source and we couldn’t build hobbyDB without them. Interested in getting involved? Email us at support@hobbydb.com and we’ll get you set up.

We also have multiple supporters who believe in us so much that they have become investors in PPG and hobbyDB.  

• Anthony Castro | Pop Fiend
• Chris Gast | Gastlecast
• Dah Veed | Toyzilla
• Isaac Thomas  |   Pops Galore & More
• John Hamm  |  Founder, PPG
• Lee Biars  |  7 Bucks a Pop
• Paul Scardino |  The POPthusiast
• Ryan Hilbert  |  Mystery Pop

With the power of the community behind us, we know that we can continue to be the number one resource for Funko collectors. 

It has always been our mission to be able to offer both our Squad members and community supporters an opportunity to benefit from the site they love. We wanted the business to be owned by collectors and this is why we do Crowdfunding, so that if PPG does well, so will you. 

We purposely kept the minimum investment to the lowest number our crowdfunding platform WeFunder allows. That way, Members can invest $100, $1,000 or however much they like. The last day to invest is this Friday, June 21.  

We would like to encourage you to own as much of hobbyDB as you can afford (keeping in mind that owning shares in a private business is risky). And if you have already invested, we want to say again a sincere thank you for believing in PPG.

– Alexandra, Chris, Christian, Isaac, Timo and the rest of the hobbyDB Team

The post Our Plan to Improve the Accuracy of the Price Guide appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

When it comes to collecting Funko, several things will always ring true.

You fell in love with the first Pop! you ever saw. You’ve seen a Pop! in a store or online and thought “I need that.” You still get excited every time you see that green upward arrow next to an item on your Pop Price Guide Top-10 list.

We here at PPG are Funko lovers and collectors, just like you. And have been since 2016! We’re entering our eighth year as the (most reliable) authority when it comes to collecting Pop!s, Soda figures, Mystery Minis and lots more.

Over the past few months, we’ve received multiple requests for folks to come aboard and invest, so once again, we’re opening our doors to fanatics worldwide and giving you the opportunity to own a piece of PPG and its partner hobbyDB.

Equity crowdfunding basically allows anyone to easily invest in companies that they believe will do great things! By uniting fans of all kinds, we’ll be able to shape the future of collecting and create a resource that we all love to use.

As PPG and hobbyDB grows, so does our power!

Our long term goal is to unite 100,000 collectors as Shareholders of the company. Our mission is to create a massive grassroots audience that can make PPG / hobbyDB the most influential company in the collectible and fan merch market (and share the financial upside with its core members). If we can achieve that, we can really shape the destiny of the collectible galaxy.

Join the PPG / hobbyDB Family

We here at PPG and hobbyDB are collectors, just like you. When we say “just like you,” we mean it.

PPG and hobbyDB are owned by 1,432 of its members. That’s hundreds of like-minded fanatics putting their faith in us while helping to grow and improve. And over the last four rounds, our share price has grown to reflect the value of our progress every year!

With that, we’re excited to share our new and improved profile on Wefunder! For as little as $100, you can own 89 PPG / hobbyDB Shares (and if you invest more you own more!).

Why Invest in PPG / hobbyDB?

Pop Price Guide and hobbyDB is revolutionizing the fandom experience by creating a home that has everything that every collector and fan needs.

Our Vision

Blending our current solution with the power of AI, we will ultimately give you the ability to –

1. Use the PPG / hobbyDB App anywhere to scan or photograph an item and find out all about it using photo matching
2. Automatically manage your collection (for example insure it to the value you feel right, automatically offer duplicates for sale or best offer etc)
3. Utilize artificial intelligence to find answers to all of your burning questions such as which items went up in value the most over the last year, product specific information, and much more
4. Show you relevant new products from anywhere around the world of interest to you (using items in your collection, wish list and ratings)
5. Be the place where you can find any information you need about your hobby or ask questions to the Community

Join 1,432 other Members that have become Investors in our goal to conquer the collectible galaxy!

Find out more and invest today at Wefunder

The post Own a Part of Pop Price Guide / hobbyDB – Round Five Now Open! appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

Today we have a fun update for those Pop Price Guide members with any pesky duplicate items in their collections. Now you can merge duplicate items in your collection into one single entry.

The new tool finds exact duplicates in your collection – same item, same condition, same notes, etc. – and then combines them into a single Collectible entry.

The quantity on the combined item will be equal to the number of duplicates. For example, if you have three of the same items in your collection, they will be combined into a single entry with a quantity of three.

To get started, select the “Dashboard” option under the “My Stuff” dropdown tab. You’ll find the “Merge Duplicates” button located on the left side under “Collection Tools.”

Click here for a shortcut!

Give it a try and let us know what you think! As always, we’re here to answer any questions. Message us in the comments below or at support@hobbydb.com.

The post New Feature! Merge Duplicate Items in Your Pop Price Guide Collection appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

But what if we were able to take it to the next level and give you the ability to personalize your Showcase even further!?

A few months ago, one of our team members decided that they wanted to make their Showcase their official website to make it even easier to show it off to the world. They stumbled upon a company called Porkbun and had an extremely pleasant experience as the team was very fun and helpful when it came to setting up his own website URL.

For those of you who are less tech savvy like me, I was a little confused about what it meant to turn your Showcase link into your own website. Luckily the team at Porkbun was able to explain –

With just a few simple steps, you can set up URL forwarding to point your personalized Porkbun .link to your Pop Price Guide / hobbyDB Showcase or Marketplace.

So for example, instead of a URL such as hobbydb.com/marketplaces/hobbydb/users/YOURNAME, imagine having ultimatefunkocollector.link. Or what about legoman.link, hardrockhamburg.link or redlinerracer.link? The choice is yours!

From there, sharing your personalized Showcase link with your friends and fellow collectors is a breeze. And lest we forget, quite stylish. In fact you can add it to your email signature or FB profile.

Check out the link from hobbyDB’s Canal Noises as a great example!

And if you dive deeper, you can even link to specific parts of your Showcase, for example –

• wishlist.canalnoises.link (for Christmas)
• shop.canalnoises.link (items for sale)
• vw.canalnoises.link (a list)

The best part – it’s FREE for the first year! Yep, you heard that right.

As a perk for our members, PPG is partnering with Porkbun to give the first year of your .link domain name for FREE. After that, it’ll renew at a current, already-low regular .link domain renewal rate, which is currently less than $8 per year.

And for those of you that feel passionately about having a .com, there is an option for that too at which the Porkbun folks offer for $10.37 a year.

Decide you don’t want to renew your .link domain at the end of the year? Your PPG Showcase or Marketplace will be unaffected. It will just go back to the original PPG link that you already know.

Setting up your URL forwarding is easy! Check out Porkbun’s article on how to set up URL forwarding for simple steps to send all your Showcase and Marketplace visitors exactly where you want them.

Ready to get started? Message us at support@hobbydb.com and we’ll gladly answer any questions or concerns. Click the Porkbun Pig below to get started!

The post Get Your Own Pop Price Guide / hobbyDB Website! Free and Super Easy to Set up! appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

But sometimes the bugs have other plans.

If you manage your collection or wish list on PPG or are one of our sellers we thank you for your patience as we work to improve the site’s technical infrastructure. In the coming weeks, we’ll be focusing all of our development capacity on infrastructure work.

The remaining time will go towards resolving check-out bugs with the Request Shipping process and finishing our Variant Group project, which aims to reduce and clean up Subvariants, Autograph and Customs. Read more about the project here.

Among other issues diligently being worked on by our team is making sure your collection value updates every day. That’s in addition to making sure items appear sooner when added to your Collection as well as the Pop Price Guide Marketplace.

What’s the Plan?

If you’re interested in some details on what’s happening under the hood (totally okay if you’re not, just skip this section), here’s what we know and what we’re planning to do.

hobbyDB and Pop Price Guide have “write” servers that write to the database whenever a change is made, like adding Price Points or editing a Database Item, and “read” servers that deliver the content whenever visitors load a page on the site. The read servers are what handle most of the traffic.

On Tuesday morning (21 November at about 6 a.m. MST) our read server started to hit 100 percent load capacity (called CPU usage %), and has stayed maxed out almost continually. For context, the normal load on these servers usually hovers around 30-40 percent.

That’s the reason for the slowness and we are still trying to work out exactly why the servers are maxing out. A few possibilities are DNS issues, some change at Microsoft Azure, bots, or someone trying to scrape data from PPG, but we don’t know the root cause yet and work through all of these issues in turn.

As we investigate and troubleshoot we are also making headway with infrastructure optimizations so we don’t get hit so hard like this if problems come up in the future. One of those optimizations was removing 15 gigabytes of unneeded information from database tables yesterday (that process, funnily, is called “vacuuming” tables).

Here’s what we plan to do in the next few weeks –

• Vacuum all other tables
• Remove some tables and other old code that are not needed anymore
• Upgrade Rails (our web application framework) to a higher version
• Deploy Pgbouncer (a tool that allows better usage of our servers) which needs that higher Rails version
• Refactor encoding of our database
• Improvements to a number of other frequently used queries
• Follow other suggestions that we are receiving from the technical support team at MS Azure team (we host with Microsoft)

Thank you again for your patience as we work to restore and improve PPG. As always, we want to know your thoughts. Message us at support@hobbydb.com and we’ll do our best to address any questions or concerns.

The post Pop Price Guide Home Cleaning: Ironing Out Bugs and Site Speed Issues appeared first on Pop Price Guide.

Our continued quest to upgrade PPG brings us even more ways and means to search for that exact collectible that you seek. We’re calling it Pop Price Guide Search 3.0.

That includes three new improvements, based on suggestions from our community –

• Typing in the search box and pressing enter/return on your keyboard will again start a brand new search.

• There are now two buttons next to the search box- “New” and “Add.” “New” starts a fresh new search, same as pressing enter. “Add” adds your search terms to the Filters, allowing stacking like pressing enter has done during the past two months.

• The Database Items/Subjects/Marketplace/Members buttons below the search box are now links instead of radio buttons. When you click on one it will take you right to that section of the site where you can start a new search.

This is all in addition to our detailed search filters, found on the left side of every page. Here you can pair down your searches to meet your exact needs.

Check out our complete guide to searching the PPG database by following this link.

What do you think? Give it a try and let us know. We’d love to hear your comments and feedback. Tell us below or by messaging us at support@hobbydb.com.

The post New Look Pop Price Guide Database – Even More Search Filters and Tools appeared first on Pop Price Guide.