Premium Accounts at 3.99. Preview of possible Trade Dispute System (Page 2 of 3)

Okay. To start, I made some suggested edits to the Trading Rules document and uploaded it here.

Major changes:

- Including a section (1.3) on taking advantage of price anomalies like the Polukranos dude did. The language is fairly strong ("major" anomalies only) because I don't want people to become concerned that treating a shockland like it's $7 when TCGmid says it's $8 will get them banned or whatever.

- Added a section (4.5) outlining that new rules may be implemented as necessary.

- Added a section (4.6) outlining that these rules may be overridden if a user has a suspicious trading history (eg. tons of packages go missing when sent to him, etc.)

- Edited section 2.2 to make it clear that showing a tracked package arrived at the destination is sufficient for a trader to have covered his side of a trade (if a delivery dispute exists.) In light of that one guy who was recently arguing that the "proof of delivery" requirement meant that tracking isn't enough.

If you like these edits you can use them in whole or in part. The next thing I'd look at if you like this stuff is the guidelines for filing a trade dispute in the stickied thread, outlining some stuff about how to handle the dispute resolution process that would be good to mention beforehand (don't act like the other party is a scammer in a he-said she-said case, don't imply that because you have X karma that the mods should favor you, etc.) but probably aren't worth putting in the trade rules page.

A lot of the motivation here is just thinking of the cases that have arisen in recent months that weren't really clearly covered by the rules and lead to new decisions, but... these decisions were never written back into the rules, which at best opens the possibility for more messy cases and at worst makes the process seem arbitrary. I think it's just important to keep the rules updated to reflect the BTR decisions that are being made.

Last edited by 9700377 (2014-12-19 03:53:52)

This is great, thank you! All points are great.

One thing I would do, in order to keep the size of the document small so that people read it, is move the 4.5 and 4.6 in the general website Terms & Conditions, and reduce them to just a mention with a link, such as:

(or something similar)

i think this is a fine change to keep some of the BTR private (we don't really need to see the bickering or vulgarity that comes out of these sometimes.) However, I think visibility on the issues serves as both an educator and warning. 

I would strongly recommend posting some kind of summary of what happened after the BTR is completed, especially if a user was overtly rude, racist or threatening (which I've seen happen before).  People have a right to know who they're dealing with in trades. 

If you're making it into a ticketed system almost like for help-desk issues then this could also help you categorize BTR disputes.  You could develop searchable key words to get a matrix on what the big BTR issues are.  Some are obvious, but as a reporting analyst, i can tell you that sometimes comprehensive data can tell you things you don't expect.

Example summary could look something like:

User A, did not receive cards. Cards sent without tracking.

User B, accused User A of not reporting "received" correctly, proceeded to call User A racists names and use derogatory terms.

Resolution: User B, re-sent user A cards with tracking.  User A received cards and was allowed to leave negative feedback.

Last edited by elpablo (2014-12-19 14:11:57)

I'd avoid as much guilt-determining language as possible ("offenders") in the rules personally. For example, there might be a person who genuinely has a shitty local post office that keeps losing their packages or whatever. We should be able to make a determination against that person ("this sucks, but it's on you now") without needing to fulfill the added burden that they be shown to be a scammer. Anyways, yeah, I'll work on breaking apart some of the language tomorrow and seeing what should maybe go in some of the other documents of interest.

I probably won't touch on the stuff that mentions the revised BTR process or feedback changes, though, since I don't know what's going to happen with that, exactly.

You're not the only one. This came up during the Polukranos case a while back (and if we really want to discuss it I'd suggest making a new thread for it.) The rule isn't meant to punish people who take advantage of small discrepancies or just have some sort of asymmetric information in their favor. It's meant to punish people who notice clear bugs and who, instead of reporting the bugs, choose to capitalize on them in a way that undermines the ability of users to trust in the pricing system. I didn't offer much guidance on this rule because I didn't want to get too wordy on that page, but it's possible that I could outline more-specific guidelines as a tooltip or something. I don't envisage people getting pulled into BTRs because they moved more-quickly than Deckbox on a price spike, or because TCGMid says a card is $8 when Deckbox says it's $7, etc.

"Caveat vendor", taken in its extremes, could be used to dismiss the utility of the entire BTR process. The rules exist so that people can trust in both the site and one another. Behaviors that seriously undermine this trust need to be addressed. This has only arisen one time, and that's why I do recognize that overly-broad language could end up putting-off more users than it ends up protecting, but otoh if we're going to punish people for breaking this rule (which we should) we should take some effort to actually define it.

Last edited by 9700377 (2014-12-19 15:52:24)

How hard would it be to implement something that searched the addresses of publicly known scammers on new accounts? This would prevent people from making a new account to get around a BTR.  Or is this not an issue?

We don't have to pay for the premium version to add the promo version of Sultai Charm, do we?

That said, I do think the notion of paying for privacy is reasonable. That mirrors what github.com does. Every repo is public by default, unless you want to pay, at which point, the repo can be private.

Last edited by terrafrost (2014-12-20 17:40:59)

I'd suggest contacting the deckbox admin if your first bill for $41.00 in sales is $10.85. 6.9% of $41.00 is $2.83 which is what your bill should be. That is lower than ebay + paypal fees which are around 10% combined.

Make sure to check with deckbox admins, because 10.85 out of 41 is incorrect according to their fees table.  6.9% + paypal is very reasonable compared to ebay and tcgplayer.  The site has to be able to sustain itself, it can't just be one person putting in all the effort and money (sebi) and everyone else just taking.  Sebi is very nice and won't bite if you contact him about issues with bills and so forth, just let him know of the issues and I am sure he will correct it.  If the 10 dollars you are referring to is from the initial set up of the account, those ten dollars are credited back to your sellers account so that the first 10 dollars in fees that are incurred are taken care of.

Sure except that if he paid his intial $10, and has incured .85 in fee's, he has $9.15 in credit and owes nothing, which is not what he said at all. The OP makes it sound as if deckbox's transaction fee is 25% or something crazy (he says its higher than Ebay which he's just flat wrong about).

Sebi knows I will criticize deckbox if I feel something isn't correct but at least get the facts correct if you want to discuss things.  I like this site and want to see it grow and evolve and prosper.

I have separates question for you sebi related to premium accounts.

I realize you are still in a state of transition/figuring things out and have 2 questions if I sign up for a 1 year premium account today:

a) If you decide to add additional service levels (ie premium, premium plus,etc) within the next year, am I locked in to the highest service level for a year?
b) If you decide to lower price levels again within the year, will you credit current premium subscribers as you just did with this price change.?

He sold for about 20$, but we do not bill the shipping costs, we only take 6.9% of the actual card value. So the end value he has incurred in fees so far is 85 cents.