Personally I think the site should focus on recruiting more sellers. I often check deckbox for a card before checking TCG player, but many times TCG player will have the card, or will have it substantially cheaper (usually due to shipping charges). I find this odd as deckbox typically has lower fees than TCG player, and the money is transferred instantly to PayPal as opposed to the approximate 1 week wait on TCG, also it's so much easier to manage your inventory on deckbox as an individual user than it is on TCG player as an individual seller. I do understand that there are premium services that will sync your inventory with TCG player for you, if Deckbox could add (or advertise if it already exists) compatibility with these same services (think http://www.crystalcommerce.com) I think they could get a lot more sellers on here.

First off, I do think Sebi deserves a lot of thanks and appreciation for a pretty damn good site, and a free site at that.

That being said I find a simple workaround for the near future would be:
1) The addition of a "Donate" button
2) Perhaps a premium rate similar to Humble Bundle, where users can pay whatever amount they like (for x number of games), but must spend at least the average that users are spending to get the bigger name titles.

I find the rates for the premium memberships to be incredibly steep, especially for the services offered. I personally would never spend more than $25 for a year of being a premium member, and that is assuming that there is a reason to do so. I think at the moment that this "premium" patch/update looks like a stopgap solution to financial issues that maybe wasn't thought out completely. But like I said I think the addition of a "Donate" button would work wonders, especially as all of this is being sorted out. Also, I think a good idea for a premium membership would be some sort of trading insurance where you could be backed for up to $X amount or something like that. I feel as if that could be a good starting off point rather than the current premium services.

As a side note, I like my decks being automatically organized by Cost. I honestly don't know what other user would disagree here, I mean I would strongly appreciate a setting option for that as well.

I work at a pretty excellent job, love the site, would love to see it continue, but the price point is currently pretty steep. I don't mind dropping $20/year for sites that have Premium Features I barely use because I realize part of that trade-off is also helping keep that loved site alive.

For future consideration, Premium features I would use would be:
* 'owner' card view: For a given deck, show what cards I have that I could use to assemble it. The current display has me need to figure out for each and every card which version of that card that I have. It'd be sweetness to show which cards I should pull from inventory.
* 'Add unowned cards from this deck to wishlist' - or even potentially assemble a buy order from current deckbox vendors!
* 'promo' view: List available promo/foils for a given deck. For a very few decks I enjoy blinging them out: if deckbox wants to point out those bling points that more potentially has me trading for or buying those cards. Plus it feels like a premium-ish feature.

I'd buy in for $20/yr regardless. Thanks for the hard work! <3

It seems to me that much of the objection to this is that it's unclear as to what the primary motivation is. If the site simply isn't making enough money and needs to become monetized, that's one thing, but if you're trying to say that these new premium features are legitimately worth $7/month, that seems unreasonable.

Personally, I do not see these new features as being worth nearly that much. That said, if deckbox truly needed money to get back, I'd probably consider making a donation or paying a small regular fee to use the site. I do, however, object to this "in-between" approach, where rather than ask for donations or develop true premium features, lackluster features (relative the cost) are developed and hidden behind a high monthly fee.

Also, rolling out premium before an app is completed seems like poor timing.

I do appreciate all the work that goes into deckbox-it is a great tool. I hope that in the future, major changes are applied more tactfully; moving away from TCG prices and the premium release do not seem like they were introduced in the right manner and have likely alienated some users.

mboyarsky wrote:moving away from TCG prices and the premium release do not seem like they were introduced in the right manner and have likely alienated some users.

Moving away from TCG prices was forced by the introduction of the marketplace... the site lost its API access.

Personally I think the site should focus on recruiting more sellers.

Maybe, but I'm actually not sure if this is the case. I've only made like one sale on Deckbox in the past month, which I think indicates that the market has become a lot more competitive. That said, yeah, there are probably opportunities for some huge sellers to move in and really blow people like me out.. those people would also probably be willing to pay for premium pricing tools and analytics.

Yes, I understand why they did it, but the shift could have gone much smoother. All of a sudden, many prices were simply gone or were wildly different than they were the day before. And it was a long time until most of the prices were fixed.

Once again, I'm less commenting on the changes themselves and more about the manner in which they were introduced.

Collection Edition Checklist View

Ah, damn. The main thing I've been waiting for and it's paid. That was a smart move but Deckbox, as I'm sure it'll be a strong motivator that will push some over to the paid side. The pricing for the premium is a bit high for my tastes (for a $1 more I get a monthly subscription to Hulu Plus or Netflix), and for this sort of non-essential tool, I'm more in the $1-2/mo camp.

Sebi: Thanks for keeping the remaining features free. I've seen some good organization tools out there, but this is the only one that's online and free to use (other than now the premium side). One shouldn't be expected to work for free in life, so I appreciate your (and your team's) generosity in offering so many hours of your life for free for a community that includes many ingrates who don't value your time, and only want to get, get, get due to a sense of entitlement.

I've been using the site for a while now. I post on the forums and read many more posts. I'm what you would call a spike player. I play to win and use the site with that mindset. I look for value on trades when i can, try to trade up.

My .02 about the new features listed...

• priority support - What does this even mean? if there's a bug it's probably affecting everyone and you need to fix it anyway right? Can you clarify what this means? Do you mean better support for trading issues? Are you offering a TCG player like guarantee for people that don't receive their orders?
• no advertisments - seems okay, but the adds weren't really a bother anyway, unless they start becoming nsfw, if they did. I'd have to leave the site for sure.
• emergency collection backup recovery - umm... i guess this is okay... the site really isn't structured in a way that these types of accidents should happen often. Unless you get more requests than we know about.
• Built decks - the only built decks that matter are the ones on my shelf at home. Anything on the internet is impermanent by it's very nature. I don't know that this is a valuable feature. You can only ever use 4 of a given card in a deck and you can only play one deck at a time and i just use proxies in the deck i'm not playing atm. I don't know many players that keep multiple copies of cards, especially high dollar ones.
• Public and Private notes for each card - what kind of notes? like small text messages? what does this feature mean?
• The Scratchpad section - largely useless imo.
• Private or password protected decks - this could be somewhat relevant, but if it became relevant for me, i'd just remove my decks from deckbox. There are lots of places that offer deck building/saving that are private. You could be hurting yourself on this one.
• Mobile Application (iOS & Android) - This is the thing i might actually pay for. a one time $5 charge for a robust version of deckbox on my phone. the site works fine on mobile, but it's a little cumbersome. It's not really touch intuitive. More development time should spent here.
• Collection Tagging & Card Scan Attachments - i don't even know what this is.

Other things I might actually pay for.

• Better price comparisons - ebay. amazon, etc... It's a lot better than it was, but i still have to check TCG and SCG to make sure. I'm not sure what kind of deal you could work with TCG to get their prices into a premium feature, but it's still the go to source for pricing.
• Market analysis tools - price histories, matrix cross sectioning of cards played in recent tournaments and counts of those cards in top decks.
• Tournament reports - lists of cards played in top tournaments and who has those cards for trade.
• Meta Data - Lists of cards that are most traded on deck box, and reports on overall trade histories. Does deckbox trading habits mimic real world purchasing habits?
• better deck building analysis tools - the current analysis tool doesn't take into consideration dual lands in decks or hybrid mana symbols etc (at least that's the way it looks).
• Built in tournament matching tools - especially in a mobile app. I want to draft a box with my friends etc... it'd be nice if deckbox has a built in swiss match maker.
• Player performance tracking - Allow import/export of player match histories and allow that player to edit those matches with extra meta date like (type of deck played), specific # of games won so players can get a sense of how they do from game to game and what they're tough matches are. I've read some pros say they might enjoy a feature like this and have been having to track it themselves.

Thank you for the feedback guys.

I will close this thread as it seems most discussions are about politics and not actually about the features themselves. It seems some of the people participating in the thread did not even try our free trial to take a look at the features but seem to have very strong opinions nonetheless.

Feel free to open threads discussing specific features of the premium plan, how you like them and what you think can be better, in the Site Feedback forum.

Thank you very much to the people that decided to support us. I will post updates with features under development, as always.

Haha, turns out I posted that exactly after ElPablo wrote a very big post on the topic at hand, isn't that some weird coincidence :)

Will post reply to your questions now, reopened this.

Not trying to beat the horse, but I was going to edit my original post before Sebi closed the topic to also ask. the following

https://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=103013#p103013

BTW thanks for reading my post either way.

I don't know that the offered features are competitive with other "freemium" trading sites IE: puca trade, a lot of the paywall features they have are already included in deckbox free and I can't see using their model without driving people away so....

Sebi said he's working on a response to my inquiries. I'm genuinely confused about the nature of some of the premium features and would like to hear from Sebi/DBteam about why they feel those features are valuable.

Without hearing back from them so take this with a grain a salt. First blush feels a little bit like... "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today..." which would make premium members basically investors in the site and helping fund future projects. To that end, if there was a guarantee that if I signed up now and there was some sort of "points system" (borrowing from puca trade again) that i could use to get cards/merchandise/something physically valuable later down the road other than promises of continued development then, i might be able to buy in.

tldr: how would I convince my wife "investing" in deckbox is a good idea? :P

elpablo wrote:priority support - What does this even mean? if there's a bug it's probably affecting everyone and you need to fix it anyway right? Can you clarify what this means? Do you mean better support for trading issues? Are you offering a TCG player like guarantee for people that don't receive their orders?

It means if you have a problem and write me an email or post on the forums, I guarantee to read it and answer it as fast as I can. It basically means I reserve some time for you to solve the issues.

emergency collection backup recovery - umm... i guess this is okay... the site really isn't structured in a way that these types of accidents should happen often. Unless you get more requests than we know about.

People accidentally delete their inventories, or mess things up importing or exporting. We have more tools now that allow mass import by edition, which can cause issues.

It also might happen that there are bugs which cause you to lose card information unless you personally made a backup. If you are premium, I will take time to help you recover your data.


Sorry the features provided by the premium plan do not seem to satisfy you, I hope other users (which have been asking for many of these for years) will find them useful.

I did post on the thread there.

To clarify, there is no "deckbox team", it is just me :)

elpablo wrote:puca trade, a lot of the paywall features they have are already included in deckbox free

They are, but it seems that is my mistake. Puca trade have a healthy business I presume, and employees, developers and support staff. I do not even have an income for myself, and feedback seems to be that people are pissed off even when they are daily using those free features...

sebi,

thanks for a great site. I initially registered as a seller not ever really planning on selling anything, but mostly as a way to give something back. Now I get to try Premium for quite some time.

In my book, that is a very fair deal.

-Frank

Frank wrote:sebi,

thanks for a great site. I initially registered as a seller not ever really planning on selling anything, but mostly as a way to give something back. Now I get to try Premium for quite some time.

In my book, that is a very fair deal.

-Frank

Thank you for the support! Much appreciated! :)

I did post on the thread there.

To clarify, there is no "deckbox team", it is just me smile

touche, you do the work of a team.

well, the site has done a lot of things right, and I'm personally glad you want to continue to improve it.

In my other post, i wasn't complaining that the features you offered for premium wasn't what I personally would pay for. I just wanted to better understand the features and offer feedback of other things I would look for. TBH, your descriptions on the premium page come off as a little ambiguous (maybe some more detailed explanations there). There are other sites that provide some of what I said, but everything is so spread out. A one stop shop for features like that would be valuable.

On another note, have you thought of selling the site (or a portion of it)? to get the capitol you need to build a team and "do this for a living"?

Nothing is perfect but your website is one of the best that does what it does imo.

elpablo wrote:On another note, have you thought of selling the site (or a portion of it)? to get the capitol you need to build a team and "do this for a living"?

Nobody will pay for the website, and then also pay me money to do what I do now for free, when the website has negative profits, and its features are seen as not worthy to be paid for by its user base.

I also always felt this website has a lot of potential, and it can become so much nicer than it already is (which I think it is, no false modesty). I always hoped others will see it the same way and I will have a way to hire people and build the coolest Magic the Gathering platform on the internet.

I never would have wanted to sell it because I made it and always had very high hopes for it, through all the years...

Only it would seem I am very naive... and I can't even hire myself haha!


And I am still determined to do my best to work towards that. Only it is not humanly possible to support 10.000 active users for free, so I am trying to figure out the best way to apply the little time I have.

For now, I hope people will understand that the premium account is just that - users that think this site is valuable to them, and are willing to support its health and growth. In turn I will dedicate the time I have to make sure they get the best Magic the Gathering platform on the internet, or as close I can get to it :)

I am sorry if I cannot offer a happy solution for everybody for free... but it is just not humanly possible...

I closed one thread and then I managed to wax nostalgic in another... I think I have to get some sleep. :)

sebi wrote:

elpablo wrote:On another note, have you thought of selling the site (or a portion of it)? to get the capitol you need to build a team and "do this for a living"?

Nobody will pay for the website, and then also pay me money to do what I do now for free, when the website has negative profits, and its features are seen as not worthy to be paid for by its user base.

There are a ton of features on this site that make it awesome, but I think that monetizing it through the market place was a better plan. Keeping it free for your users allows you to expand your user base easier. You really should look into getting more large scale businesses [u]selling[/u] on deckbox. More competition is very good for the market, and more transactions would bring you more income.

I have sold on TCG player, and their interface for listing items is terrible. Managing more than 100 items using their web interface is enough to give you migraines. I don't believe the sellers that are successful there are listing thousands of items using their interface, but rather are synchronizing their inventory using a third party such as http://www.crystalcommerce.com/ This means that if you can get those third party sync sites to incorporate your website into their sync service then sellers that are already using their service can easily list their thousands of items here too. I'm sure this would be some work for you, but I think it is something worth looking into, and a way to help you better compete with big vendors like e-bay, amazon and tcg player. If those same sellers that are selling on e-bay/tcg/amazon are also selling here, then I'd rather buy here and have it automatically enter those items into my inventory.

Merged and reopened this thread.

gumgodMTG, I did not abandon the marketplace, and will continue to support it. I thought it will be much bigger too, and there would be no need for premium accounts. Sadly, that was completely false.

We do have one big store selling there already http://deckbox.org/users/adventureson

Some users are using it, and I intend to make things better there too, don't get me wrong.

It is just that those sites you mentioned have already a number of users many orders of magnitude more than deckbox.

Even deckbox users that seem to like it here still do shop on tcgplayer and other places, and not here. I am not sure why... I suppose it also takes time for it to gain some footing...

Okay, i had no idea this existed http://deckbox.org/statistics

Seems like advertising features better might help too... there should be a quick way i can access this from my profile. I mean seriously, wtf mate? :P

sebi wrote:Some users are using it, and I intend to make things better there too, don't get me wrong.

It is just that those sites you mentioned have already a number of users many orders of magnitude more than deckbox.

Even deckbox users that seem to like it here still do shop on tcgplayer and other places, and not here. I am not sure why... I suppose it also takes time for it to gain some footing...

time is a factor, but for me it's this.

[u]Deckbox[/u]
Do I have any guarantees when I buy cards on the website?

We can guarantee that your money went directly to the seller, and that he has a verified PayPal account. We will provide you with an invoice for the payment, and assist you in opening a fraud case with PayPal should the seller be dishonest. We will contact and discuss with the seller in case of disputes. We will suspend and mark him publicly as a scammer should he cause loss of value to buyers. Please see our Terms and Conditions, Market Rules and Privacy Policy for more details.

[u]TCG Player[/u]

IF YOUR ORDER HAS NOT ARRIVED OR IS NOT AS DESCRIBED

Contact the Seller first. Mistakes can happen and many of our Sellers have over a 99.5% feedback ratio that they earned by taking care of their Buyers when these mistakes happen. So give them a chance to make things right for you.

Just visit your Order History, find the order that you have an issue with, and click on the Contact Seller button to send them a message about the problem.
IF THE SELLER DOES NOT RESPOND

After you send a message to the Seller, TCGplayer is directly involved and monitors the message to make sure you are responded to. If they have not responded, we contact the Seller after 24 hours, and after 48 hours without a response we escalate the message to our customer service team. From there we work directly with the Seller, and if they are still not responding, then TCGplayer steps in to resolve the problem on your behalf and issue[u] Full or Partial refunds[/u] where your order has not arrived or is not as described.

That refund part has mattered twice on orders from them (before Deckbox opened their market, i haven't bought cards from anyone since). My orders got lost and I got my money back and was able to get my cards from someone else. If i knew i could do that here i would always buy from sellers here.

True, that is pretty important. They can do that I think because they collect the money from buyers first hand and then issue payments to the seller later when all has cleared.

They charge you another set of paypal fees for this I assume, on top of the fees for the first paypal transaction, and their 10% commission. Which means sellers get way less money, but buyers are more confortable placing orders.

The problem is, when we launched, people even complained of the 6.9% we charged - which was already less than everything else, if we had another set of paypal fees, feedback would have been even worse.

Hard to enter that market, and also listen to your users. Tcgplayer can afford to bully everyone since they are the big dude in the room. (like they repeatedly threatened to sue me after we opened the marketplace because we were still using pricing data from them - which incidentally is public on their website :) ).

Also they have employees and much, much much MUCH more money than deckbox has (because deckbox has none) :) and an existing gigantic customer base of buyers. If they please them, they can ask for whatever they want from the sellers.

That's my take on it at least, not sure how much I'm right about that.

sebi wrote:Merged and reopened this thread.

gumgodMTG, I did not abandon the marketplace, and will continue to support it. I thought it will be much bigger too, and there would be no need for premium accounts. Sadly, that was completely false.

We do have one big store selling there already http://deckbox.org/users/adventureson

I have bought from them several times, and they are why I think this feature would work. They have more items available than most regular users, and great shipping prices. With the auto match of cards on my wish list I'm able to quickly find more cards that I need and add them to the cart. Having one site (deckbox) with my wish list organized is an amazing way to shop, I just wish there were more vendors here to order from.

So I will toss my $0.02 in on this as well.

First a few things about me:

• I am a software dev my self.
• I live in a small area that has a shallow trading pool.
• I love to trade.
• I use this site a LOT. I have built many decks through trading and BUYING on here. I even got my first piece of P9 after 20 + years of playing because of this site.

That being said, I love this site. I think you have done a great job building up a great trading community online. I understand the amount of work and your need to pull in money to keep going. I have made it a point over the last few months to always check here first when I am buying cards. I want to support the site. I was all set to buy a 1-2 month subscription at the least. $7 is just too much though. That is 1/2 the cost of an MMO. Almost the cost of Netflix. You need to drop the price of the sub if you want people to pick it up.

To put a little perspective on this. I have give Reddit exactly $0.00. I am on Reddit all the dam time.

Any chance you'd be willing to lower the premium price? I can't speak for others (though I have seen a recurring theme among the few that have posted on this), but the current price is not of value to me. However, $1-$2 would be (with the current features). I certainly don't want to suggest you sell yourself short, but I often look at online SaaS and think, "10 years ago if this were software in a store, would I pay a year's worth of this SaaS cost on it?" In this case, that cost would be $117. Most software (even really good stuff), gets relegated to the $10 bin at Office Depot.

I don't know what your margins are and I, again, don't want any of this to come off insulting. I, too, am a business owner and know the importance of valuing one's own time. I just wonder if a lower pricepoint would offer an increased premium userbase that will offset the lowered cost. Personally, I would wait for a month or two to see how this pricepoint ($7) does, but after that, maybe this could go up for review?

Perhaps a Model from another Business
On a related note, an entrepreneur coach I follow, Mike Michalowich (http://www.mikemichalowicz.com/), was launching a new over-the-phone mass coaching program a few years back. The idea was, the conference call was more like an investor's call where you'd have anyone who wanted to participate take part in the call, and afterward, you can download the calls whenever you want. Of course, a system was implemented to handle the logistics and all that, but the point is that he launched the service not sure of what the price point should be. So, he sent out an email to all of us with an offer.

He presented three prices: $0.99, $9.99, $29.99. He let us choose what we wanted to subscribe at, saying we can pay what we think it's worth. I chose $9.99 per month. I'm not sure what the cost ended up settling at (he grandfathered us all in at our old prices as a thank you), but to this day I pay for it (and only use it a fraction of the time). Maybe there's some sort of lesson for Deckbox in this example?

For me as a buyer I turn to tcgplayer over deckbox simply due to supply. Deckbox doesn't have the critical mass of sellers that tcgplayer does that lets you find almost anything in stock. A huge chunk of the tcgplayer sellers use the crystal commerce platform...I think if you could work with Crystal Commerce to sync CC accounts with deckbox (and advertise this ability) you'd see a huge influx in sellers on the platform. Right now moderate sized sellers have to maintain their own processes to sync their inventory with deckbox. CC automatically does this for their own sites, tcgplayer, and ebay...adding deckbox to this would be huge.