Ground-breaking 3D high-definition viewer set to change the trading card landscape

Cornish start-up Ungraded is primed and ready to shake up the world of trading cards with the summer launch of a revolutionary new online marketplace, dedicated to ungraded or “raw” cards.

Using an imaging process developed over the last two years, every card for sale is presented in ultra high-definition, with photos taken from hundreds of angles, stitched together into a 3D viewing experience unlike any other. Exploration of each card through rotating, zooming and panning gives buyers an unparalleled insight into their condition, leaving no scratch, scuff or other value-defining defect hidden from view.

Combining their never-before-seen imaging with an authenticity guarantee on every card, the Ungradedmarketplace, launching in July, aims to put trust back into the trading card resale market. With Weekly and Premium auctions, as well as Fixed Price listings, Ungraded invites sellers to consign and send in their cards for sale.

Tools are also provided to help users with other features that can greatly affect a card’s market price, such as centring. The service has been built from the ground up, to cater perfectly to ungraded cards with tight categorisation and filters for condition and price range. These features enable users to accurately assess both the quality and value of cards, so that they can bid and buy with 100% certainty.

For collectors of Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sports cards, and many others, Ungraded aims to put an end to the lottery of buying cards based on a few low quality photographs, commonly found on other online marketplaces.

Developed by avid Pokémon card collectors Josh Williams and John Brame, who were frustrated by their own buying experiences during lockdown, Ungraded addresses both the visual limitations of traditional card purchasing platforms and the haphazard nature of card descriptions and categorisation.

Director and Co-Founder of Ungraded, Josh Williams, explains: “John and I have always had a passion for collecting cards, but like so many others we found it an incredibly frustrating, and time-consuming process. Cards would be poorly imaged and inaccurately described, which meant that finding a card of the type and condition that we wanted was a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack. Often, we’d miss the cards we were looking for, or we’d buy cards only to resell or return them as we weren’t happy with their state. We wanted to put that right.”

With over 100,000 second-hand ungraded cards being bought and sold each month, worth an estimated £1.5m in the UK alone, Ungraded believes that its solution will be widely welcomed by card collectors who’ve had similarly poor experiences of spam listings, cancelled orders, cards that either didn’t meet their expectations, or cards which turned out to be fakes.

“Our goal is to make buying and selling cards simple and safe”, says John Brame, Co-founder of Ungraded. “All sellers need to do is create a quick submission on our site and post us their cards. We’ll take care of everything else. This includes imaging, listing, insurance and shipping to buyers.”

Buyers of auction-based listings are charged on a sliding scale, starting at 20% of the card value for cards sold up to £250. This reduces to 17.5% for cards sold for £251-£1,000, dropping further to 15% for cards sold over £1,000. Buyers are not charged for purchasing fixed price cards.

There are no seller fees for auction-based listings with a hammer price of £25 or over. For sales under that figure, the seller makes up the difference between the buyer’s 20% premium and a minimum £5 fee.

For fixed price listings, reserved only for cards worth over £250, sellers are charged a 15% premium. If unsold after 30 days, a storage fee of 1% of the card’s average listing price is charged every additional 30 days the card remains unsold. This encourages sellers to review pricing.

Card enthusiasts can pre-register their interest in buying or selling through Ungraded from July by visiting www.ungraded.com. A series of promotional pre-launch weekly auctions or “drops” will also be running from the 31st May through to 8th July, with each week focusing on a different product line, including Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Soccer, MTG and American Sports.

To view the Ungraded launch preview film, click here.