Should I regularly batch update all of my Magic and/or Yugioh singles prices?
Doing batch updates to set all your Magic or Yugioh prices to a % of the market price daily or every other day is not something that we recommend.
Batch updating that many products will increase the sync delay with TCGPlayer. TCGPlayer grabs price & qty updates from your admin every 5 minutes, and they can grab a maximum of 500 products at a time. Any time price or qty gets updated on a product, that product gets put into the TCGPlayer sync queue.
If you update all 40,000+ Magic singles prices, all of those products will go into your sync queue. At the rate of 500 products every 5 minutes, it will take over six and a half hours for everything to finish syncing. If any quantities are adjusted on your products, they will have to wait for the sync queue to clear before those quantities are adjusted on TCGPlayer. This can increase your chances of overselling a card.
If I shouldn't update all my prices regularly, what are the alternatives?
What I suggest is using some of the search filters on your inventory page to narrow down the results to just the cards that need to be updated. If you want your price to be 100% of market, I recommend splitting the batch update into two sections using the following filters:
"Sell price is > 105% of market price"
"Sell price is < 95% of market price"
We also recommend something like: "Sell price between $.25 and $9999", since lower priced cards don't fluctuate as much. Using just those filters above will still find a card where your price is $.15 and the market price is $.13, since that is 115% of market price.
In the past, having to use these filters on your batch updates may have been cumbersome. However, with the new "Clone Process" feature, you just need to set it up once:
What about cards that spike in value?
For cards that jump suddenly in value, the best way to handle those is manually pricing them. Cards are most likely to spike in value when there is a major event like a Pro Tour occurring, or when a card is unbanned. During a major event, we recommend paying attention to what decks are doing well and any key cards in those decks that may have been under the radar.
Because price spikes are usually the result of a card becoming popular and selling in high volumes at the original price, the market price will often not update to reflect the higher price right away. For this reason, it's best to update your prices manually.
Price spikes are also a reason not to update all your Magic/Yugioh prices daily, since having less products in the sync queue will speed up the time it takes for the card that spiked to sync at the new price.