How DexCompare works

DexCompare compares Pokémon TCG sealed product — booster boxes, Elite Trainer Boxes, booster bundles, collections, tins, blisters and packs — across 388 independent stores in 7 regions. It does one job: show you who has something in stock and who is cheapest.

Where the prices come from

About twice a day we read each store’s public product listings (the same catalogue feed their own website uses), in the store’s own currency. Every price you see is that store’s listed price, excluding shipping. We never convert currencies: a region only compares stores that charge in its currency.

In the United States we also read TCGplayer, a marketplace of many sellers, and show the cheapest English listing among its lowest-priced offers for each product when we last read it, excluding shipping — one seller’s price, which may have changed by the time you click. It is compared with the US stores on the same terms: price, then stock. It is never counted as one of the stores.

In stock — the store listed it as available when we last read it.
Pre-order — available to order for a set that hasn’t released yet.
Sold out — listed, but not available.
Not checked recently — we couldn’t read that store for over three days, so we don’t know.

The headline “from” price is always the cheapest listing you can actually order. We match listings to products by their titles, and we’d rather leave a listing out than put it on the wrong product: singles, graded cards, accessories, other languages and store-made bundles are excluded.

Which stores, and why

A store is listed when it passes four checks, run by a script before it is added (the feed, currency and robots.txt checks run again on every read): it publishes a public catalogue feed (the Shopify or WooCommerce product listing its own website is built on — we read that, not the pages); it lists at least three Pokémon sealed products; it prices them in its region’s currency; and its robots.txt allows the read. We pause between requests and back off when a store asks us to.

That rule decides who is missing, too. Big-box chains and department stores without a public feed are out of scope, however large their Pokémon range, and so is any store that prices a region in a converted currency. It is why the store lists are independent hobby and games stores, and why a region with few of those (Singapore, New Zealand) has fewer comparisons than Australia or the US. Marketplaces are not stores: TCGplayer appears in the US as a marketplace, badged as such, and is never counted in “N stores”.

What we refuse, with examples

A listing has to be English-language Pokémon TCG sealed product, as the manufacturer sealed it. Everything else is left out, even when the store files it under Pokémon:

Singles and graded cards — “Charizard ex 199/165 PSA 10”, “Pikachu promo SVP 085”.
Japanese and other-language product — “Pokémon Center Japan Terastal Festival box”, “Display Écarlate et Violet”. A region compares English print runs only, because that is what its stores compete on.
Other games and merchandise — One Piece and Lorcana boxes, Moncolle and Re-Ment figures, plush, binders, sleeves, playmats.
Store-made bundles and partial product — “2× ETB + 1 bundle deal”, “10 loose packs”, energy lots, opened or “unshrinked” boxes, damaged-box discounts. There is no like-for-like price for those.
Prices that cannot be real — a listing far below every other store’s price for the same product (a placeholder, or a single pack filed as a box) is dropped rather than shown as the “from” price.

The filter errs towards leaving things out. If it leaves out something it should list, or lists something it should not, report it.

Freshness

Every store is read about twice a day, and every figure on the site is from the latest read: a “from” price, a stock status, a store’s listing count, the median a region’s stores are asking. Each listing shows how long ago its store was read. When a store cannot be read for three days its listings are marked “not checked recently” and drop out of the “from” price; after two weeks they are removed. A store that lists twenty or more products and had none of them in stock at the last read is treated as dormant, and so is one whose “in stock” prices sat far below the other stores’ on many products (we do not trust those): its listings stay on product pages, marked sold out, but it no longer counts towards “listed by N stores”. We keep nothing from earlier reads, so nothing here is a trend, a history or an all-time low.

Report a listing

Wrong price, wrong product, wrong stock, or a store that should not be there: email riftcompare@gmail.com with the page’s address and the store’s name. Details on the contact page. Fixes usually land with the next read.

What we don’t keep

DexCompare keeps no price history and no stock history — only what each store lists right now — and no data about you: no accounts, no emails, no cookies. We count page views and clicks on buy links, without knowing who made them. See privacy.

How DexCompare makes money

Through affiliate links, and only two kinds. If you buy through one we may earn a small commission, at no cost to you — the price is the same as going direct.

eBay (eBay Partner Network): the eBay links, banners and search tiles around the site. Every one is an ad and says so: it carries an “Ad” label, sits apart from the store listings in its own dashed, tinted box, and opens a search for Pokémon sealed product (Buy It Now) on your region’s eBay site. We don’t read eBay: we know nothing about what is listed there or at what price, so we show no eBay price, no count of eBay listings and no “deal”.
TCGplayer (through Impact): every link to tcgplayer.com. TCGplayer is a US marketplace. In the United States we compare it alongside the stores, and it is ranked by price and stock like any store. Elsewhere it appears only as a separate, labelled US marketplace in US$, never in your region’s comparison or its “from” price.

eBay appears in a few set places: an “eBay” item in the header, a banner on each region’s home page and above the footer, banners on set, type, release and store pages, a search tile in long product grids, a “sold out here” search link under some sold-out products, and the marketplace boxes on product pages. It is never in the About, Terms, Privacy or Contact pages. An eBay unit is never part of a price table, a headline price, a store count, a per-pack figure, a median or a ranking, and it never changes the order of anything.

Links to stores are plain links: stores pay us nothing. No one pays to be listed or to rank higher, and commissions never change the order — it is price and stock, nothing else. Affiliate links and ads are marked as such next to where they appear. DexCompare is not endorsed by eBay or TCGplayer.

For stores

If you sell English Pokémon sealed product online on Shopify or WooCommerce, we can list you for free. Email riftcompare@gmail.com with your store’s address and it goes through the same checks as every other store (above). If you’d rather not be listed, email us and we’ll remove you within a day. We read a few pages of your catalogue twice a day and respect robots.txt. Listing is free and cannot be bought; nothing changes the ranking except price and stock.

Stores currently compared: 60 in Australia, 68 in United States, 64 in United Kingdom, 82 in Canada, 23 in New Zealand, 70 in Europe (eurozone), 21 in Singapore.

Not affiliated

DexCompare is an independent site and is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo, Creatures, GAME FREAK or The Pokémon Company. Pokémon and its trademarks are theirs.