How Plush Price Guide prices things
Plush Price Guide is a research tool for collectors and resellers. It answers what did this actually sell for, not what is someone asking. Those are different questions, and conflating them is how people end up holding a bear they paid $200 for because one listing said $200.
The one rule
Completed sold transactions outrank active asking prices — always. An asking price is a hope. A sold price is evidence. Plush Price Guide's engine refuses to treat active_listing or retail_reference rows as market evidence, and there is a test that fails the build if that ever changes.
Where a number comes from
- Collect every sold observation for the exact item — versions and variants are kept apart, never averaged together.
- Normalise each sale to a common baseline (Good condition, no extras) using condition and completeness multipliers measured from the sold comps themselves.
- Drop outliers beyond 1.5× the interquartile range — but only once there are at least five sales. With three, the odd one out is often the real market.
- Take the median, never the mean and never a single sale.
- Publish the 25th–75th percentile as the working range; below four comps, show the full observed spread instead, because quartiles of three points are noise.
- Assign confidence from the number of comparable sales.
Confidence
| Comparable sales | Confidence | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 10 or more | HIGH | A real market exists. Price with confidence. |
| 4–9 | MEDIUM | Directionally sound. Check the condition split. |
| 1–3 | LOW | Anecdote, not a market. Treat as a starting point. |
| None | VERY LOW | No value is published at all. |
What Plush Price Guide will not do
- Invent a price for an item with no sold data. Those items say "no sold price on record yet" and stay that way until a sourced comp arrives.
- Turn a current retail price into a resale value. Retail is shown separately, labelled as a baseline only.
- Average an original release together with a Vault reissue, or one version with another.
- Present a collector report as a verified completed sale. A sale only earns completed_sale when it carries a date, a marketplace and a listing id.
- Blindly apply a rarity multiplier. A $250 vintage employee exclusive and a $12 Mini Bean do not obey the same formula.
Evidence types
| Type | Weight | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| completed_sale | Strongest | A confirmed sale with date, marketplace and listing id. |
| auction_result | Strong | A settled auction. |
| collector_report | Supporting | A sold price recorded during research without full provenance. |
| historical_archive | Supporting | An indexed historical sale, e.g. CollectionHero. |
| active_listing | Excluded | An asking price. Never enters a valuation. |
| retail_reference | Excluded | Current shop price. Context only. |
Condition and completeness
Each multiplier is measured within the same bear: what copies in that grade sold for against copies of the same item sold as Good or with no condition stated, taken as the median across every item that has both. A grade seen on only a handful of items is pulled most of the way back to its configured starting value, and one seen on fewer than five keeps it outright, so two sales cannot set a premium.
Condition
Completeness
Where our money comes from
Sources
Plush Price Guide does not scrape marketplaces in violation of their terms. Data arrives through manual verified entry, permitted public historical sources, and official APIs where available.
Contact
Questions, corrections or a bear we have wrong: email hello@plushpriceguide.com.