Cherry Pickers (Part 2)

Last time I shared with you an email we received over at MTGO Library Central, one where the writer is concerned over the possibility of a “cherry picker.”  (A person who goes around to ‘LITE’ bots and ‘cherry picks’ the good cards with the intent of selling these same cards for a massive profit.)   So this series will touch on several ways to deal with these parasites.

One of the easiest things you can do is simply raise your prices.

Advantages:
The parasites will have to work harder to find jewels in your inventory.  They’ll swipe fewer cards, and thus, make less profits  Another side benefit is that you will make more profit for each and every card that you sell.

Disadvantages:
The raising of prices will only slow down and not deter any vultures from pilfering your collection.  While human vultures would simply find other bots which would be more worth their time, it is not all that hard for a vulture to write a custom program which will search your collection and takes your gems.  Raising your prices in this scenario simply means the vulture-bot will simply take fewer cards.

This strategy also has an unintended effect: it will deter customers.  More successful bots may be willing to make that sacrifice but smaller or newer bots won’t be able to compete. 

Bottom Line:
This is a one-time low effort that will have limited results.  This strategy will have better results when dealing with commons because the variance is smaller than with rares.  The psychological affect is much larger than any monetary effect.  The difference in the price per card from 10 per ticket to 8 per ticket is pretty small, only .025 per card, but for the customer reading the classified section, they’ll visit the 10 per ticket before they’ll visit the 8 per ticket bot.