Beckett Online: A Website You Pay for Not to Work

If you collect trading cards, mainly sports related ones like baseball, basketball, football, or hockey, then you are probably aware of Beckett. Beckett is a company and magazine publication that lists the value of what your trading cards are worth. Beckett went beyond the printed page, however, and went digital with a website. At the beginning of 2011 they updated their website, however, for some customers it may be too little too late and salt in the open wound.

Beckett pricing guides are THE premier guide for judging the value of your trading cards. Realistically markets such as Ebay are a better place to determine resale value, but Beckett is a name that has been around for a long time in the hobby. The purchase price for one of their magazines is at the time of this writing $9.99. The printed price guides can only hold so much information between the covers, so an online price guide that covers everything is a brilliant idea and a great tool for collectors. I became a member of Beckett in 2010 and found the website to be very useful when it was working. I only keep track of baseball cards and the online subscription was only $6 a month, which is a nice discount compared to the magazine. The magazine does not come with so many loading errors though!

My time spent on Beckett was finding that the website would be completely unusable at least once a day. Their IT team assured everyone they were aware of issues and always fixing things to speed up the website. Then they announced that a brand new website would be launched to fix the troubles people were having logging on. The new website was going to be a Christmas present at the end of December and promises were made to paying members that they would be given some sort of compensation for the technical issues that plagued the website.

December came and went and then so did January. Then in February the website went offline for days at a time. This was nothing new really, but more and more people who paid their subscriptions fees were voicing their concerns about being railroaded by Beckett into paying for a service that did not work. The new website went up in February and as I write this is still a glitchy mess. I do not take issue with that aspect of things right now, my problem is with the price hike and promised compensation. The launch of the new website sees the pricing guide fee go up to $9 instead of $6. It was announced that old paying members who put up with the non-working website would be allowed to access the guide at the old price of $6 for the first year.

The issue I have with this price hike and compensation offer is the fact that some paid their fees every single month, endured the spotty service like everyone else, but are not going to be offered the $6 a month for a year deal. Why? Because their subscription plan was not checked off as an automatic reoccurring charge. They chose to pay every month manually. So, when February came around and the website was not working they did not get to pay for the subscription and now if they want to get it they have to pay $9 a month instead of $6. How is this compensation for paying for a service that does not work? It also screws over all of the members who canceled their subscriptions waiting for the promised new website to begin.

Beckett has a lot of fences to mend with members, but as of right now it is the popular opinion that they will continue to ignore the outcry. They have the power to do this being such a large name in the hobby and knowing that eventually people will just pay or return, or new members will arrive.

By charging people for usage of a website that did not function more than it did Beckett seems like a good target for a class action lawsuit if any hobby members happened to be angry enough to make friends with or are friends with a lawyer. Beckett has become a tool for trading card selling businesses as well, so not only have they damaged the daily activities of an avid trader and collector, they have been hurting the businesses that rely on access to the popular book pricing and perhaps hurting the bottom line of those industry profits.