Is eBay Scraping Hard for 8,000 Card Prices a Day? Not With One API Call per Card

No, not if you let an API handle eBay. Scavio's eBay API returns up to 240 live listings for a card in one call to /api/v1/ebay/search, raw copies and graded slabs together, each with price, condition, bids, time left and seller feedback. You split them into Raw, PSA 8, PSA 9 and PSA 10 from the titles afterwards, so 8,000 cards is 8,000 calls a day rather than 40,000. Each call costs 1 credit, about $0.002 on the Growth plan billed yearly.

The question comes from r/WebScrapingInsider. A developer building a TCG scanner, in the vein of Collectr and PriceCharting, needs "daily prices of 8000 cards" across variations such as Raw and PSA 8, 9 and 10, which they counted as 40,000 requests a day, and asked whether anyone offers eBay data at that volume. Two parts of that plan change once you look at what eBay returns.

One search covers every grade

There is no need for a request per grade. eBay's search ranks every listing for the card on one results page, and Scavio returns up to 240 of them per call:

curl -s https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/ebay/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCAVIO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "charizard ex 199/165 151", "per_page": 240}'

On October 27, 2026 that one call returned 240 of eBay's 758 matching listings. Grouped by the grade in each title:

One call gave a usable price for raw, PSA 8 and PSA 9. PSA 10 is mostly sold by auction, so it needs the step below.

The grade is only in the title

eBay does not give you the grade as a field. item_aspects was empty on all 240 rows. condition hints at a slab without naming the grade: 74 of the 76 titles naming a grader came back "New (Other)", but so did 12 raw cards, and a PSA 8 and a PSA 10 share the same value. So the grade has to be parsed from text the seller wrote. The table above used a rule like this one, plus a check that the title carries the card number:

import re

GRADE = re.compile(r"\b(PSA|CGC|BGS|TAG|SGC|ACE)\s*(?:GEM\s*MINT\s*|MINT\s*)?(10|9\.5|9|8\.5|8|7)\b", re.I)

def bucket(title):
    m = GRADE.search(title)
    if m:
        return f"{m.group(1).upper()} {m.group(2)}"
    if re.search(r"\b(psa|cgc|bgs|graded|slab)\b", title, re.I):
        return "graded, unparsed"
    return "raw"

Expect misses and junk. This capture had "PSA NM MT 8" written out in words, a "(Potential PSA 10)" raw card, and five "raw" rows under $100 that were display cases, fan art and an oversized replica, not the card. Drop anything far below the bucket's median before you average; with those five removed, the 143 raw fixed-price asks had a median of $358.31.

Auctions need a second look near the end

Most PSA 10 copies were auctions, and an auction's price is the current bid. Early in a listing that number means little: two PSA 10 auctions in this capture stood at $1.25 and $4.25 with five to six days to go. Close to the end it is a real price. Sorting auctions by ending time puts those first:

curl -s https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/ebay/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCAVIO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "charizard ex 199/165 151", "buying_format": "auction", "sort_by": "ending_soonest"}'

The top rows that morning included a PSA 10 at $1,125 with 41 bids and 15 hours 15 minutes left, next to the single fixed-price PSA 10 at $1,403.40. For a daily price, take fixed-price asks plus auctions with less than a day to run, and store each day's result: that stored series is your price history.

What you will not get: eBay sold listings

eBay's sold and completed results now require signing in. Since late August 2026, a logged-out request for the Sold Items view is sent to eBay's sign-in page, and eBay's own Marketplace Insights API is a limited release. Scavio's "sold": true returns an HTTP 400 that says so, and it is not billed. Some vendors still sell sold comps; the best eBay price data APIs lists them and the questions to ask. For a scanner app, live asks by grade, near-close auction bids and the units-sold count on multi-quantity listings cover most of what users ask, which is what a card is selling for now.

What 8,000 cards a day costs

• Calls: one search per card per day, 8,000 calls, about 240,000 a month.
• Price: 1 credit a call, about $480 a month at the Growth-yearly rate of $2 per 1,000 credits. Checking slower-moving cards every other day halves that.
• Popular cards: a card with more than 240 listings needs a second page ("page": 2) to see everything. This Charizard had 758 matches.
• Speed: the 240-row call above returned in 6.5 seconds of server time, and calls run in parallel up to your plan's concurrency.

Try the eBay API free, 50 credits, no card, or try the search in the playground.

Reference: eBay API overview · search docs · how to get eBay price data · why eBay card comps need title parsing