How Pricing Works

Sideboard keeps your sell prices current automatically by pulling live market data and applying the rules you define. Understanding how prices flow from the market into your inventory helps you make smarter decisions about when to override, when to trust the system, and when to expect a delay.

Where prices come from

Sideboard connects to a market data feed that covers all supported games: Magic: The Gathering, Star Wars Unlimited, One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, Gundam, Disney Lorcana, and Riftbound. Market prices reflect active secondary-market sales — the same data professional buyers and sellers reference.

Prices are stored per condition, per printing variant, and per language. For a single card, that might look like:

This granularity means your rules can be specific: you can treat LP English differently from LP Japanese, or foils differently from non-foils.

How often prices refresh

Sideboard runs market syncs on two cadences:

Hot card sync — every 6 hours. Cards that are currently in your inventory are considered “hot” and sync frequently. If a card spikes overnight, your price updates before your store opens the next morning.

Full catalog sync — nightly (around 3–4 AM). Every card in Sideboard’s catalog is refreshed once per day. Cards you don’t currently stock are covered here, so your buylist prices stay accurate even for cards you’ve never carried.

Your plan tier also affects how quickly price changes ripple through to your inventory after a sync:

On Professional and Enterprise plans, whenever a market sync runs, Sideboard immediately recalculates your sell prices and updates your inventory — no waiting until the next day.

How your sell price is determined

Every item in your inventory has a list price — the price you’re charging. That price is set by one of two methods:

Method 1: Auto-pricing via rules

You define pricing rules — for example, “sell all Mythics at 120% of market” or “floor all Commons at $0.50.” Sideboard evaluates your rules against each card and sets the list price automatically whenever market prices update.

Rules are the recommended approach for most of your inventory. They mean you never have to touch pricing for the bulk of your stock.

See Setting Up Pricing Rules for a full walkthrough.

Method 2: Manual override

You can set any item’s price directly. Once you do, Sideboard marks that item as manually priced and stops applying rules to it. The market price information is still visible alongside your override — it’s there for reference — but Sideboard will not touch the price until you explicitly tell it to.

Manual pricing makes sense for high-value cards, signed copies, unusual conditions, or anything where the market doesn’t reflect what your customer base will actually pay.

See Manual Pricing for when and how to use overrides.

The price update chain

When a market sync runs, Sideboard works through a chain:

1. Market prices update. New prices land in the global price database, shared across all stores.
2. Your inventory recalculates. Sideboard applies your pricing rules to every in-stock item that isn’t manually overridden. List prices are updated.
3. Your buylist recalculates. Buy prices that are expressed as a percentage of your sell price are recalculated using the fresh sell prices. (Cards with no inventory entry use a cached sell-price estimate.)
4. Your Shopify store syncs. If you’ve connected Shopify, updated prices push out to your online store automatically.

The entire chain runs in the background. You don’t need to trigger anything manually.

Conditions Sideboard tracks

Sideboard uses standard TCG condition grades:

Market data providers typically have the most coverage for Near Mint prices. When a condition’s price isn’t directly available from the market feed, Sideboard estimates it using your configured condition-adjustment percentages. Estimated prices display with an asterisk (*) so you know they’re inferred rather than observed.

See Price Inference for how that estimation works.

Variants Sideboard tracks

Not every game has all variants, and not every variant has market data. Sideboard only stores a price record where there is actual market data to sync.

Language coverage

Sideboard tracks prices per language where market data exists. English has the broadest coverage. Japanese (especially for MTG and One Piece) is well-covered. Other languages vary. If a language-specific price isn’t available, Sideboard will not automatically fall back to English — the field will simply show as unavailable rather than silently showing you the wrong currency reference.

The SKU system

Behind the scenes, Sideboard assigns a unique identifier (SKU) to every combination of card + condition + variant + language. This SKU is what gets pushed to Shopify and other integrations, and it’s how Sideboard keeps your marketplace listings in sync with your actual inventory. The format looks like:

SB-MTG-BLB-142-FOIL-EN-NM

You don’t need to manage SKUs manually — Sideboard generates them automatically.

What’s next

• Setting Up Pricing Rules — Define rules that keep your prices competitive on autopilot.
• Manual Pricing — When and how to override auto-pricing for specific items.
• Price Inference — How Sideboard fills in prices for conditions with no direct market data.
• Adding Products to Inventory — Get your cards into Sideboard so pricing rules have something to work with.
• Setting Up Buy Pricing Rules — Apply the same rule-based logic to your buylist prices.

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