How we make money
Plainly, and up front — because a deal engine you cannot trust is worthless.
Affiliate commissions. When you open a listing on eBay through Deal Sniper and buy it, eBay may pay us a commission through its Partner Network. The price you pay is the same either way.
Commission never touches the scores. Every score on this site — the Deal Score, player and card scores, fair values, tiers — is computed by a deterministic model whose inputs are the player, the card and the market. A card that pays us more can never outrank a better card that pays us less.
That is enforced, not promised. A test walks the real import graph outward from every file in the scoring engine and fails the build if a revenue module is reachable from any of them, at any depth. Transitive on purpose: a direct import is easy to catch in review, and a four-hop one through a helper is not. The engine is also forbidden from naming the click-log table, because a helper is not the only way into a database. Both checks were verified by deliberately breaking them.
What commission MAY influence, and the honest limit of the rule above: when two cards have already cleared the same quality bar and landed in the same tier, business analytics may decide which of them is shown first. Ordering inside a tier — never membership of it. That is a real influence and we would rather write it here than have you find it. What it cannot do is put a card in front of you that the evidence does not support, because tier membership is decided upstream, by code that has no way to learn what anything pays.
What we never do: fake urgency, fake scarcity, invented viewer counts, hidden sponsorships, automated bidding, or a “Buy” label on evidence that does not support one. When nothing clears the bar, the homepage says so.
Collectibles are speculative. Prices can fall, and often do. Nothing here is investment advice; the model ranks cards, it does not promise outcomes — and our public track record keeps every call we made, losers included.
The full methodology is on the Research page: the formulas, the evidence rules, and what every confidence label means.