How DexCompare works

DexCompare compares Pokémon TCG sealed product — booster boxes, Elite Trainer Boxes, booster bundles, collections, tins, blisters and packs — across 390 independent stores in 7 regions. It does one job: show you who has something in stock and who is cheapest.

The same Elite Trainer Box is often priced very differently from one shop to the next on the same day, and one shop’s sold-out page says nothing about the next one’s stock. Every listing here carries the time it was last read, so you can see how fresh a price is before you click through.

Where the prices come from

About twice a day we read each store’s public product listings (the same catalogue feed their own website uses), in the store’s own currency. Every price you see is that store’s listed price, excluding shipping. We never convert currencies: a region only compares stores that charge in its currency.

In the United States we also read TCGplayer, a marketplace of many sellers, and show the cheapest English listing among its lowest-priced offers for each product when we last read it, excluding shipping — one seller’s price, which may have changed by the time you click. It is compared with the US stores on the same terms: price, then stock. It is never counted as one of the stores.

• In stock — the store listed it as available when we last read it.
• Pre-order — available to order for a set that hasn’t released yet.
• Sold out — listed, but not available.
• Not checked recently — we couldn’t read that store for over three days, so we don’t know.

The headline “from” price is always the cheapest listing you can actually order. We match listings to products by their titles, and we’d rather leave a listing out than put it on the wrong product: singles, graded cards, accessories, other languages and store-made bundles are excluded.

Shipping and tax

Shipping differs between stores, and within a country by where you live: an Elite Trainer Box that is cheaper by $10 is not cheaper if it costs $20 more to post to you. So once a week we ask each store’s own checkout what it charges to post one item (a cart with a pack, then with items around a few price points, up to a booster box) to several addresses in each region: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Darwin, Canberra (AU); New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago (US); London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast (UK); Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary (CA); Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin (NZ); Madrid, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam (EU); Singapore (SG). Each row of a price table shows what was quoted for an item near its price, as a range when it depends on the address or the order value, and “Shipping at checkout” when we have no measurement (stores whose checkout we cannot ask, and TCGplayer). We never guess a rate. Pick “Price + shipping” above a price table to rank by the price plus the cheapest measured shipping; the default ranking is price and stock. The carts we create only ask for a quote; nothing is ordered, and the store’s own checkout is always final.

• Australia — Australian stores list prices including GST.
• United States — US prices exclude sales tax, which depends on your state (and sometimes city) and is added at checkout.
• United Kingdom — UK stores list prices including VAT.
• Canada — Canadian prices exclude GST/HST and provincial sales tax, which depend on your province and are added at checkout.
• New Zealand — New Zealand stores list prices including GST.
• Europe (eurozone) — Eurozone stores list prices including VAT.
• Singapore — Singapore stores list prices including GST.

Buying from a store in another country can add import duties or tax on delivery; the store's checkout or the carrier tells you.

Which stores, and why

A store is listed when it passes four checks, run by a script before it is added (the feed, currency and robots.txt checks run again on every read): it publishes a public catalogue feed (the Shopify or WooCommerce product listing its own website is built on — we read that, not the pages); it lists at least three Pokémon sealed products; it prices them in its region’s currency; and its robots.txt allows the read. We pause between requests and back off when a store asks us to.

That rule decides who is missing, too. Big-box chains and department stores without a public feed are out of scope, however large their Pokémon range, and so is any store that prices a region in a converted currency. It is why the store lists are independent hobby and games stores, and why a region with few of those (Singapore, New Zealand) has fewer comparisons than Australia or the US. Marketplaces are not stores: TCGplayer appears in the US as a marketplace, badged as such, and is never counted in “N stores”.

What we refuse, with examples

A listing has to be English-language Pokémon TCG sealed product, as the manufacturer sealed it. Everything else is left out, even when the store files it under Pokémon:

• Singles and graded cards — “Charizard ex 199/165 PSA 10”, “Pikachu promo SVP 085”.
• Japanese and other-language product — “Pokémon Center Japan Terastal Festival box”, “Display Écarlate et Violet”. A region compares English print runs only, because that is what its stores compete on.
• Other games and merchandise — One Piece and Lorcana boxes, Moncolle and Re-Ment figures, plush, binders, sleeves, playmats.
• Store-made bundles and partial product — “2× ETB + 1 bundle deal”, “10 loose packs”, energy lots, opened or “unshrinked” boxes, damaged-box discounts. There is no like-for-like price for those.
• Prices that cannot be real — a listing far below every other store’s price for the same product (a placeholder, or a single pack filed as a box) is left out rather than shown as the “from” price.

The filter errs towards leaving things out. If it leaves out something it should list, or lists something it should not, report it.

Freshness

Every store is read about twice a day, and the site is updated from the latest read once a day: a “from” price, a stock status, a store’s listing count, the median a region’s stores are asking. Each listing shows how long ago its store was read. When a store cannot be read for three days its listings are marked “not checked recently” and drop out of the “from” price; after two weeks they are removed. A store that lists twenty or more products and had none of them in stock at the last read is treated as dormant, and so is one whose “in stock” prices sat far below the other stores’ on many products (we do not trust those): its listings stay on product pages, marked sold out, but it no longer counts towards “listed by N stores”. We keep nothing from earlier reads, so no figure here compares today with an earlier day.

Report a listing

Wrong price, wrong product, wrong stock, or a store that should not be there: email riftcompare@gmail.com with the page’s address and the store’s name. Details on the contact page. Fixes usually land with the next read.

What we don’t keep

DexCompare keeps one snapshot a day of each product’s cheapest in-stock price and how many stores have it in stock (the price history on product pages, from 15 October 2026), and nothing more about the stores’ past listings. It keeps no data about you: no accounts, no emails, no cookies. We count page views and clicks on buy links, without knowing who made them. See privacy.

How DexCompare makes money

Through one Google ad in some guides, and through affiliate links of three kinds: eBay (the eBay Partner Network), TCGplayer (through Impact) and, in Australia and New Zealand, Amazon AU (the Amazon Associates programme). If you buy through one we may earn a small commission, at no cost to you — the price is the same as going direct. Every one is marked where it appears: eBay with an “Ad” label, TCGplayer with “affiliate link”, Amazon with the Associates statement beside it. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The full affiliate disclosure.

Some guides also carry one Google AdSense ad, labelled “Advertisement”. Google chooses what it shows; no advertiser pays to change a price, a ranking or a guide. How Google uses cookies for these ads.

We keep them out of your way: at most one ad on a phone screen at a time and two on a wide screen, no pop-ups or countdowns, space kept for every ad before it loads so nothing you are reading gets pushed aside, and no ads on this page or the Terms, Privacy or Contact pages.

Amazon AU

On Australian and New Zealand pages, product, set and type pages, pre-orders and the guides carry a “Check price on Amazon AU” link to amazon.com.au. We show no Amazon price, rating or stock: we don’t read Amazon, so the link opens Amazon’s own page (or its search for the product) and Amazon’s page is final. Amazon is never ranked with the stores.

eBay

The eBay listings you see are real Buy It Now listings. On a schedule (once a day, in the default setting) our server asks eBay’s official listing service (its Browse API) for them and stores the latest few for each place they appear; your browser fetches them after the page loads, and each unit says how old its listings are. Each listing is shown as eBay lists it — its title, photo, price in the currency eBay shows, its shipping and, when it is not new, its condition — never converted, counted or averaged, and it links to the listing on eBay. Because they are imported on a schedule, not live, a price or its availability may have changed by the time you click: eBay’s page is final. We keep a listing only while it can be shown (a day or so) and then delete it. Where there is nothing to show, a unit is a single “search eBay” button.

Where eBay appears:

• Listing strips, in a dashed, tinted box of their own: two on each region’s home page (sealed Pokémon, then chase cards further down), and one on product, set, type, release, store, deals, cheapest-per-pack and “this week” pages, the first page of the product list and each guide; most pages also have a slimmer strip above the footer.
• Listing tiles in long product grids (browse, set, type and deals pages): a tile the size of a product card after every 16 products, at most two in a grid, framed and labelled the same way and never the same listing as the page’s strips.
• On a product page, the product’s own eBay listing, when it has one, always marked “Ad” with how old it is: a tinted row of the price table, placed by its price among the stores that have it in stock (after them when the row is an eBay search, and always in New Zealand and Singapore, whose listings come from another country’s eBay in its currency); the best price at the top of the page, when that listing is new and cheaper than every store that has the product in stock (not for a pre-order), with its per-pack price and how it compares with the median and MSRP, its shipping and the cheapest store’s price beside it; and the eBay-blue button in the Marketplaces box, which shows the listing’s price when the top of the page is not already showing it. Without a listing, the row and the button are searches for the product on eBay.
• When a product is sold out at every store, the sold-out notice at the top of the page has an eBay box: a search for the product on eBay or, where eBay has its own new listing (not for a pre-order, and not in New Zealand or Singapore), that listing with its price, shipping and age. TCGplayer is the second choice under it, and products of the same kind that are in stock follow the price table.
• A buy bar on phones: on a product page, once the price at the top has scrolled out of view, a slim bar at the foot of the screen repeats it — the same store, TCGplayer or eBay button the top of the page shows, labelled the same way. It hides while the price table, another ad or the footer is on screen, and you can close it for the rest of your visit.
• Search buttons: an “eBay” item in the header on wide screens, a “Shop … sealed on eBay” button in the strip of every set that is out (popular sets say “Shop … on eBay”), and, when you search the product list, one box that searches eBay for the same words. A search button opens eBay’s own results.

Those product-page places are the only ones where eBay is part of the comparison: the one tinted row of the price table, placed by its price, and the same listing shown at the top of the page, in the sold-out notice or in the Marketplaces box. eBay is never counted in the number of stores or the median, never changes the order of the stores, and its listings never appear in what search engines read of a page.

TCGplayer

Every link to tcgplayer.com. TCGplayer is a US marketplace. In the United States we compare it alongside the stores, and it is ranked by price and stock like any store; set pages, guides and searches of the product list also link to a TCGplayer search, marked “affiliate link”. Elsewhere it appears only as a separate, labelled US marketplace in US$ (in a product’s Marketplaces box and as the second choice when a product is sold out), never in your region’s comparison or its “from” price.

Stores

Links to stores are plain links: stores pay us nothing. No one pays to be listed or to rank higher, and commissions never change the order — it is price and stock, nothing else. DexCompare is not endorsed by eBay or TCGplayer.

For stores

If you sell English Pokémon sealed product online on Shopify or WooCommerce, we can list you for free. Email riftcompare@gmail.com with your store’s address and it goes through the same checks as every other store (above). If you’d rather not be listed, email us and we’ll remove you within a day. We read a few pages of your catalogue twice a day and respect robots.txt. Listing is free and cannot be bought; nothing changes the ranking except price and stock.

Stores currently compared: 61 in Australia (AUD), 68 in United States (USD), 64 in United Kingdom (GBP), 83 in Canada (CAD), 23 in New Zealand (NZD), 70 in Europe (eurozone) (EUR), 21 in Singapore (SGD). Each region compares its own stores in its own currency, so a price is one you can actually pay, before shipping. The same booster box in all seven, side by side: booster box prices by country.

Not affiliated

DexCompare is an independent site and is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo, Creatures, GAME FREAK or The Pokémon Company. Pokémon and its trademarks are theirs.