Editorial & pricing policy
Last updated: 23 October 2026
RiftCompare publishes two things: prices we collect ourselves, and writing about the Riftbound market. This page explains how both are produced, who is responsible for them, what we do when we get something wrong, and how we make money. If anything here does not match what you see on the site, that is a bug — please tell us.
What is automated, and what isn’t
We are explicit about this because the distinction matters. Four different things appear on this site:
- Prices and market data — collected automatically from public store listings and marketplace APIs, twice a day. No human writes these numbers.
- Card page analysis — the “About” section on each card page is assembled programmatically from that card’s own recorded data: its cross-market spread, its price trajectory, how many stores stock it, what its variants cost, where it sits in its set. It is generated by our own code, not an AI model, and every statement in it is derived from a figure we have actually recorded. Where the data doesn’t support an observation, the observation is left out rather than guessed at.
- Guides and posts — drafted with AI assistance, then edited and fact-checked by Bill, as above. The figures they quote are the ones our importer recorded.
- Nothing is written by AI while you browse. No price, card description, tool result or article is written by an AI model when you open a page or use a tool.
How prices are collected
We track 268 stores across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Canada and the EU, plus eBay in every market, TCGplayer’s listings in the US and the CardTrader marketplace in the EU. Prices come from those stores’ own public product listings and from the marketplaces’ APIs; every source is listed on our methodology page. We do not accept price submissions from retailers, and no retailer can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to have a competitor removed. The one thing in an order that follows commission is that eBay and TCGplayer, our affiliate partners, are shown first, marked as paid links — see how we make money.
Each listing is matched to a specific printing — set code and collector number, not just a card name — so a promo, an alternate art and a Signature print are tracked as three separate products with three separate prices, because that is what they are.
How often prices refresh
- Store prices and sealed products: a full import runs twice a day, at 07:00 and 19:00 UTC. TCGplayer, CardTrader and Cardmarket are read on the same runs.
- eBay: once a day we search eBay for every card worth at least US$5 at TCGplayer’s US market price, plus any card with no TCGplayer price yet (usually a new release); base-rarity commons and uncommons are skipped, not the whole catalogue searched. Australia and the US are searched every day; the UK, Singapore and the EU take turns, one a day, so each is refreshed about every three days. On the other daily run, the promo, Signature and overnumbered printings in that day’s markets are searched again, so those refresh twice a day. Canada’s eBay rows are the US results converted to Canadian dollars.
- eBay auctions ending soon: every four hours.
- Price history: every day we record each card’s cheapest price across the Australian, US, UK and Singapore markets, in US dollars (between 31 August and 3 October 2026, once a week). Every market’s chart, the price movers and the RiftCompare Index read that one series, converted into the market’s own currency — a worldwide low, not your market’s own history.
- Card pages: rebuilt after each import, and never cached for more than 24 hours.
- Homepage: rebuilt after each import, and at most six hours old.
- RiftCompare Index: moves once a day, when a new history snapshot is recorded.
Every price on the site is the last figure recorded by an import, not one fetched when you open the page. Stock sells and shops re-price between imports, so always confirm the price on the retailer’s own site before you buy. We say so in the footer of every page for the same reason.
How prices are verified
- Each import replaces a store’s listings with what it lists now. If a store can’t be read, its previous prices stay for up to 3 days and are then removed — so a store’s brief outage doesn’t wipe it from the comparison, and a store that has stopped answering doesn’t linger.
- Twice a day an automated health check flags any store we haven’t read in 30 hours, whose listing count suddenly drops, or whose prices freeze or jump.
- A store’s prices are refused if they arrive in a different currency from its market’s. Sealed products count as in stock only while a store shows them open for sale.
- Store comparisons are priced in each market’s own currency, at the price the store itself charges. The exceptions: in Canada, rows marked “eBay US” are US listings converted to Canadian dollars; a eurozone visitor can see UK store prices in euros, with the pound price beside each; and the Deal Finder, the homepage’s savings figures and the price-history charts convert TCGplayer’s US price or our US-dollar history at the reference rates published on our methodology page.
- Comparisons list the cheapest item price first, with the delivered total shown where the store publishes its postage. A store’s known postage breaks ties between otherwise-equal prices, but a store is never pushed down just because a competitor’s postage happens to be known and its own is only quoted at checkout. Never by what we earn — except that eBay and TCGplayer are shown first, labelled, as described below.
- A consistency audit runs over the card database on demand, checking for duplicate records, broken identifiers, impossible prices and stale listings.
- Every wrong-price report is checked and marked confirmed, rejected or fixed; when one is fixed, the person who reported it is emailed if they left an address.
Corrections
When we find or are told about a wrong price, we fix the underlying data; the affected pages show the correction when they are next rebuilt, which happens after every import. Where a published guide or post turns out to be wrong rather than merely out of date, we correct the text in place and move its last-updated date, so the change is visible rather than silent.
When an article’s premise has expired — a launch-window piece after the launch, a snapshot overtaken by a new set — or it duplicates a better page, we retire it and permanently redirect its address to the page that now covers the topic, so links keep working and nobody lands on stale advice.
How to report an error
For a price, use the “Spotted a wrong price? Report it” link under the store comparison on the card’s page: it tells us exactly which listing you mean. For anything else, email riftcompare@gmail.com or use our contact form. The most useful report includes the page URL, what it says, and what it should say — a link to the retailer listing settles almost every pricing question in one step.
How we make money, and what it does not buy
RiftCompare is funded by display advertising (including Google AdSense); affiliate commissions — we are a member of the eBay Partner Network, TCGplayer’s affiliate programme (run through Impact) and the Amazon Associates programme, and as an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases; Plus and Pro subscriptions; and the Stores plan, which a retailer buys for a private report on its own prices and a “Verified store” mark on its own store page. A store on the Stores plan is compared exactly like every other store: nothing it pays for changes its place in any comparison. Some stores are store partners: they give our visitors an exclusive discount code, shown as a label beside their price, and may pay us a commission on the orders we send. The price we show is before the code, and a partner ranks exactly where its price puts it. Outbound links that earn us a commission are marked rel="sponsored" and disclosed in plain language next to the link.
None of it affects the prices we show. It affects the order of a comparison in one labelled way: since 27 October 2026 every card comparison, and each product on our Radiance pre-order table, shows eBay and TCGplayer, our affiliate partners, first, marked as paid links, whatever their price. They are often not the cheapest: the number beside each row is its rank by price, a pinned row that costs more says by how much, the “Cheapest” badge stays on the cheapest copy, and the headline price is always the cheapest offer from anyone. Every store below them is ranked by item price, with known postage breaking ties; a store we earn nothing from outranks one we do whenever it is cheaper. Outside the comparisons we also promote eBay with labelled “Search eBay” links and boxes. eBay buttons use eBay's own colour and carry a “Paid link” tag. See our privacy policy for what advertising and analytics cookies are set and how to opt out.
Independence
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Riot Games. No retailer we compare owns any part of RiftCompare, and beyond the affiliate programmes described above we have no commercial arrangement with one. We do not accept payment for editorial coverage, and we do not publish sponsored posts.
Nothing on this site is financial or investment advice. Trading card prices are volatile and can fall as easily as they rise.
We also do not market our tools as a way to profit at another buyer’s expense. Our paid tools exist to answer buying questions — what is the cheapest way to get this list, and is today’s price a good one. Where a tool reports demand or price-timing signals, we say plainly what it measures and where it is uncertain, rather than dressing it up as a strategy. See who RiftCompare is for.