How our data works

Card shops

Shop listings are seeded from public business data (Google Places), filtered to card and hobby retail, and published only when a listing has a rating, an established review history, and posted hours. We cache each shop's photo and recent review excerpts (labeled as Google reviews), and crawl the shop's own website to detect the games and services it actually offers. Listings that turn out to be unrelated businesses are removed. Ratings and hours are refreshed on a rolling schedule (roughly every 30 days).

Card shows

Shows are compiled from promoter websites, venue event calendars, official social pages, and event aggregators — then verified against a primary source before publishing. Shows we can't confirm stay unpublished. Each recurring show gets one permanent page listing its upcoming dates, plus a page per confirmed date. When a show has no confirmed upcoming date, its page says so rather than guessing.

Ratings & ranking

The Community Rating shown on shop and show pages is seeded from each business's public Google rating — every Google review counts as one inferred vote — and adjusted by first-party 1–5 star votes cast on CardsNearby. Both inputs enter the same weighted average, so local votes progressively shift the number. We never republish Google's rating in structured data; review markup uses only votes collected on this site.

Ranking on city, state, and specialty pages uses the CardsNearby Score (0–100): review strength (adjusted for volume, max 40), verified card specialization (max 20), services like buylists, grading drop-off and organized play (max 20), and data completeness — a working website, posted hours, photo and description (max 20). A dedicated card shop with verified services can outrank a general store with more reviews.

Limits & corrections

Hours change, shows move, shops close. If a listing is wrong, use the correction link on that page or see corrections — fixes ship quickly. Owners and promoters can update their own listings via For vendors.