Topic: State of the Marketplace

Sebi, I'm hoping you can provide an update on the Deckbox Marketplace for us:

1. The state: how are we doing? Is the marketplace growing in terms or buyers? Sellers? $ spent?

2. Advertising: is anything being done to advertise the Deckbox marketplace? How do new customers find us? Also I still think Deckbox merch would go a long way to get the word out.

3. Deckbox pricing: previously you stated that adding stores as sellers would go a long way to improve pricing. Since then I've seen only one store added (and it's US-only sad). Is anything being done to get more stores on here? Is there anything else being done to improve pricing? i.e. updating algorithm accuracy, spike protection, update more frequently, provide users a method to "flag" card prices as inaccurate (instead of the Pricing Issues thread)

4. Seller pricing tools: still woefully inadequate (This thread)

5. Optional seller conditions: currently sellers can only try to protect themselves by writing conditions in their profile and then hoping you'll back them up vs negative feedback when buyers ignore these conditions and orders get cancelled. This is a bad experience for everyone. Conditions must be enforced by the site. (This thread and many others) i.e. min & max order $, min & max order # cards, forcing shipping options with tracking based on order $ or # cards, automatically applying discounts, requiring seller order approval before an order can be paid for

6. Sealed Product: is anyone selling sealed product? Buyers need to be able to view what is actually in stock instead of only viewing by category. What was the driving force behind this large investment of your time?

7. Other stuff:
- It's hard to fill large orders since I can't sort the card list
- Shipping options get difficult to maintain the more you have
- Can you put a link to the Marketplace in the top bar in addition to the shopping assistant?

Thanks!

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Re: State of the Marketplace

Optional seller conditions: currently sellers can only try to protect themselves by writing conditions in their profile and then hoping you'll back them up vs negative feedback when buyers ignore these conditions and orders get cancelled.

One additional point is that sellers can also write these conditions into their *shipping options*. This guarantees that buyers see them.

But yeah, for me the fundamental problem with Deckbox market is that the number of "feel bad" sales I made were very high, and this made it overall an... unenticing proposition. Sebi has focused on making the experience smooth for buyers but hasn't done much to incentivize sellers to sell on Deckbox market beyond the simple fact that it's easy to price cards that we already have listed in our collections, and that Deckbox's cut of sales isn't that high. But if you actually do something like just use Deckbox's "price all" feature every week, you are going to end up having a frustrating time.

If I could make one single change, it would be to let users put dollar quantities on trades as just another item, and then set up some structures to facilitate those payments and have Deckbox take a cut. This could be done in addition to the current market features, and then people could choose whichever way that they want to engage in sales. I understand why Sebi build things the way that he did, but I just don't think trying to emulate the TCGPlayer experience really fits well with the advantages of Deckbox - I want to be able to place all my cards up for sale, but I don't want to continually be annoyed by selling cards that Deckbox's prices are wonky on, or having to sell a bunch of bulk that's barely worth the price of digging up, or whatever.

Re: State of the Marketplace

9700377 wrote:

One additional point is that sellers can also write these conditions into their *shipping options*. This guarantees that buyers see them.

Good point, sellers should be aware that they can do this. It helps, but doesn't solve the problem.

To reiterate, the problems with putting conditions in the profile and/or shipping options:

- For the seller: will Sebi back me up and remove negative feedback based on my text? Will Sebi do it fast enough that I won't lose sales? Which conditions will Sebi back up and which ones will he not?

- For the buyer: I don't want to have to read all that and I don't know if the seller's conditions will be enforced anyway. Some seller's conditions may be unfair or break site rules or laws (!). And this is just text that can change any time, so who's to say that the seller doesn't change it after my purchase to justify cancelling my order? Sebi having to dig through server logs to see if the text changed would be a nightmare.

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Re: State of the Marketplace

One week. Bump.

Sebi I'm not expecting you to have all the answers - I'm hoping to start a discussion. I think you need more feedback from your user base and we need more info from you.

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Re: State of the Marketplace

Many of the reported issues are indeed true, there is a lot of work to be done that can improve the experience for buyers and sellers.

I am working on providing more options for min/max shipping options in a release next week.

Re: State of the Marketplace

d72B wrote:

- It's hard to fill large orders since I can't sort the card list

Sorting also coming next week.

- Shipping options get difficult to maintain the more you have

Not really sure how this can be helped...

Can you put a link to the Marketplace in the top bar in addition to the shopping assistant?

It was there for a very long time but I tried to clean up the top menu a bit 2 weeks ago and that is when it was removed. It is still present in left menu on all users profiles, under Trades.

Re: State of the Marketplace

I do have one suggestion for the marketplace that shouldn't be too difficult to implement: It'd be nice if you could have it so that you can only list a subset of your cards for sale. eg. If I have 10 Wooded Foothills, I might want to keep a playset and have the remaining 6 for sale. Right now there's no way to do this unless you give 6 of your cards a special flag or something silly like that.

For me the status quo is a problem because sometimes I'm a bit loose with my inventory - I'll list cards that I'm receiving as parts of other trades before I actually have them, for example, so that I can negotiate trades with them while they're coming to me. But I can't do this with sales because if I can't say "sorry, don't have this yet" to someone who buys a card.

Re: State of the Marketplace

9700377 wrote:

It'd be nice if you could have it so that you can only list a subset of your cards for sale. eg. If I have 10 Wooded Foothills, I might want to keep a playset and have the remaining 6 for sale.

In this case you set your inventory count to 10 and you tradelist count to 6... or are you saying this doesn't work?

9700377 wrote:

I'm a bit loose with my inventory - I'll list cards that I'm receiving as parts of other trades before I actually have them, for example, so that I can negotiate trades with them while they're coming to me.

This is poor practice. While it doesn't seem to be against site rules, I'm sure this will cause headaches when cards come in late or in poor condition.

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Re: State of the Marketplace

I just noticed now that Deckbox (when browsing signed out) publishes my Inventory Count for cards that are on my tradelist... what's the point of paying for Premium for a private inventory if subsets are needlessly exposed like this?

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Re: State of the Marketplace

d72B wrote:

I just noticed now that Deckbox (when browsing signed out) publishes my Inventory Count for cards that are on my tradelist... what's the point of paying for Premium for a private inventory if subsets are needlessly exposed like this?

Sorry for that, it's a bug. Should be fixed for next release.

Re: State of the Marketplace

Actually it's a pretty big bug, I'm trying to fix it and redeploy now.

Re: State of the Marketplace

Fixed.

Re: State of the Marketplace

sebi wrote:

Fixed.

Confirmed, thanks

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Re: State of the Marketplace

One month later...

d72B wrote:

Sebi, I'm hoping you can provide an update on the Deckbox Marketplace for us:

1. The state: how are we doing? Is the marketplace growing in terms or buyers? Sellers? $ spent?
No Response. Personally I've seen an uptick in sales in 2016, but I'm curious how Deckbox and other sellers are doing.

2. Advertising: is anything being done to advertise the Deckbox marketplace? How do new customers find us?
No Response. Does Deckbox advertise? I noticed there was a MTG blog site that was linking to Deckbox for cards, but I can't find it now. Can you announce these types of partnerships?

3. Deckbox pricing: Is anything being done to get more stores on here? Is there anything else being done to improve pricing? i.e. updating algorithm accuracy, spike protection, update more frequently, provide users a method to "flag" card prices as inaccurate (instead of the Pricing Issues thread)
No Response

4. Seller pricing tools: still woefully inadequate (This thread)
No Response. In addition to the linked thread I'd like something as simple as a checkbox in the mass pricing tool that allows me to price only unpriced cards. I have almost 20,000 cards listed and I have thousands that I'd like to add, but I can't price them without resetting the prices for all 20k...

5. Optional seller conditions: currently sellers can only try to protect themselves by writing conditions in their profile and then hoping you'll back them up vs negative feedback when buyers ignore these conditions and orders get cancelled. This is a bad experience for everyone. Conditions must be enforced by the site. (This thread and many others) i.e. min & max order $, min & max order # cards, forcing shipping options with tracking based on order $ or # cards, automatically applying discounts, requiring seller order approval before an order can be paid for

sebi wrote:

2016-02-19 10:41:16: I am working on providing more options for min/max shipping options in a release next week.

Three weeks later, no release... it seemed like we were making progress on this thread...

6. Sealed Product: is anyone selling sealed product? Buyers need to be able to view what is actually in stock instead of only viewing by category. What was the driving force behind this large investment of your time?
No Response...

7. Other stuff:
- It's hard to fill large orders since I can't sort the card list

sebi wrote:

2016-02-19 10:46:25: Sorting also coming next week.

Three weeks later, no release...

- Shipping options get difficult to maintain the more you have
Dismissed

- Can you put a link to the Marketplace in the top bar in addition to the shopping assistant?
Dismissed

- I just noticed now that Deckbox (when browsing signed out) publishes my Inventory Count for cards that are on my tradelist... what's the point of paying for Premium for a private inventory if subsets are needlessly exposed like this?
Fixed

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Re: State of the Marketplace

I don't think there's much of a point to harassing Sebi about this. He didn't promise some sort of timetable on new feature implementation. It was just agreed that there were some good ideas out there.

I mean, I wish things were improved but the marketplace has existed in its current form for... over a year now? Two? Things won't be revamped overnight.

Re: State of the Marketplace

9700377 wrote:

I don't think there's much of a point to harassing Sebi about this.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

9700377 wrote:

He didn't promise some sort of timetable on new feature implementation. It was just agreed that there were some good ideas out there.

No, he actually said when to expect a fix for a couple items and I will keep him honest.

9700377 wrote:

I mean, I wish things were improved but the marketplace has existed in its current form for... over a year now? Two? Things won't be revamped overnight.

So it's clear that Sebi hasn't seen the need to change it and that's what we're working on here. No one is expecting anything, but I will check in once a month on this.

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Re: State of the Marketplace

d72B wrote:
9700377 wrote:

I don't think there's much of a point to harassing Sebi about this.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Or it gets tuned out because the criticism stops being seen as constructive and more as just being annoying. You can't bug a developer into implementing new features for you.

d72B wrote:
9700377 wrote:

He didn't promise some sort of timetable on new feature implementation. It was just agreed that there were some good ideas out there.

No, he actually said when to expect a fix for a couple items and I will keep him honest.

Fair enough, he did say this for a couple items.

Also, didn't see your replies to a couple old items:

d72B wrote:
9700377 wrote:

I'm a bit loose with my inventory - I'll list cards that I'm receiving as parts of other trades before I actually have them, for example, so that I can negotiate trades with them while they're coming to me.

This is poor practice. While it doesn't seem to be against site rules, I'm sure this will cause headaches when cards come in late or in poor condition.

Generally I won't confirm trades before I have the cards in hand. I recognize this is a risk I'm taking though, and I internalize the majority share of the risks (eg. if an issue with a card does arise, I'll just have to buy a new copy.) Delaying trades just because you don't have cards in hand yet is just another form of poor practice.

d72B wrote:
9700377 wrote:

It'd be nice if you could have it so that you can only list a subset of your cards for sale. eg. If I have 10 Wooded Foothills, I might want to keep a playset and have the remaining 6 for sale.

In this case you set your inventory count to 10 and you tradelist count to 6... or are you saying this doesn't work?

If I want to have 6 on my tradelist but only 3 for sale, I can't do this. And there are more reasons one might want to do this than just the one I describe.

Last edited by 9700377 (2016-03-11 18:29:47)

Re: State of the Marketplace

d72B wrote:

One month later...

d72B wrote:

Sebi, I'm hoping you can provide an update on the Deckbox Marketplace for us:

1. The state: how are we doing? Is the marketplace growing in terms or buyers? Sellers? $ spent?
No Response. Personally I've seen an uptick in sales in 2016, but I'm curious how Deckbox and other sellers are doing.

2. Advertising: is anything being done to advertise the Deckbox marketplace? How do new customers find us?
No Response. Does Deckbox advertise? I noticed there was a MTG blog site that was linking to Deckbox for cards, but I can't find it now. Can you announce these types of partnerships?

3. Deckbox pricing: Is anything being done to get more stores on here? Is there anything else being done to improve pricing? i.e. updating algorithm accuracy, spike protection, update more frequently, provide users a method to "flag" card prices as inaccurate (instead of the Pricing Issues thread)
No Response

4. Seller pricing tools: still woefully inadequate (This thread)
No Response. In addition to the linked thread I'd like something as simple as a checkbox in the mass pricing tool that allows me to price only unpriced cards. I have almost 20,000 cards listed and I have thousands that I'd like to add, but I can't price them without resetting the prices for all 20k...

5. Optional seller conditions: currently sellers can only try to protect themselves by writing conditions in their profile and then hoping you'll back them up vs negative feedback when buyers ignore these conditions and orders get cancelled. This is a bad experience for everyone. Conditions must be enforced by the site. (This thread and many others) i.e. min & max order $, min & max order # cards, forcing shipping options with tracking based on order $ or # cards, automatically applying discounts, requiring seller order approval before an order can be paid for

sebi wrote:

2016-02-19 10:41:16: I am working on providing more options for min/max shipping options in a release next week.

Three weeks later, no release... it seemed like we were making progress on this thread...

6. Sealed Product: is anyone selling sealed product? Buyers need to be able to view what is actually in stock instead of only viewing by category. What was the driving force behind this large investment of your time?
No Response...

7. Other stuff:
- It's hard to fill large orders since I can't sort the card list

sebi wrote:

2016-02-19 10:46:25: Sorting also coming next week.

Three weeks later, no release...

- Shipping options get difficult to maintain the more you have
Dismissed

- Can you put a link to the Marketplace in the top bar in addition to the shopping assistant?
Dismissed

- I just noticed now that Deckbox (when browsing signed out) publishes my Inventory Count for cards that are on my tradelist... what's the point of paying for Premium for a private inventory if subsets are needlessly exposed like this?
Fixed


Been asking for an option to sort large orders by set for a few years now hope it happens soon

Re: State of the Marketplace

April Update

Questions:
A. The state: how are we doing? Is the marketplace growing in terms or buyers? Sellers? $ spent?
No Response.

B. Advertising: is anything being done to advertise the Deckbox marketplace? How do new customers find us?
No Response.

C. Deckbox pricing: Is there anything else being done to improve pricing? i.e. involve more stores, updating algorithm accuracy, spike protection, update more frequently, provide users a method to "flag" card prices as inaccurate (instead of the Pricing Issues thread)
No Response.

D. Sealed Product: is this feature successful?
No Response.

Feature requests:
1. Seller pricing tools

sebi wrote:

2014-09-09 03:58:29 - First step towards this will be to make the mass price tool work only on the currently applied filters, so you can filter your tradelist based on your requirements and then applying a % formula will apply only to those.

(from this thread)
Will this be implemented? If not can talk about alternative implementations? e.g. an addition to the tool to set prices only where prices are unset

2. Optional seller conditions
Min/max $ order value in shipping options has been implemented! Thanks Sebi!
Other conditions sellers have requested:

  • requiring seller approval for orders that meet some criteria

  • support for combining orders (add-on orders)

3. Sort cards in an order

sebi wrote:

2016-02-19 10:46:25 - Sorting also coming next week.

Is this still coming?

4. Shipping options get difficult to maintain the more you have
Fixed! Thanks Sebi

5. Bug: private inventory values published
Fixed! Thanks Sebi

6. Separate the number of cards for trade from the number of cards for sale. Use tradelist count only for trading and add a new "sale list" count.
Sebi, does this sound reasonable?

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Re: State of the Marketplace

d72B, this thread has always felt to me like I'm being "grilled" and pressured into responding, with periodical reminders of my failings.

I am not quite sure I am comfortable with the level of transparency (on a public forum) that some of these questions require.

Re: State of the Marketplace

Sorry Sebi, that's not my intention. I've been trying to start a conversation here and I may have crossed the line trying to get you to respond.

Thank you for answering my questions by finally saying that these won't be discussed here. I'll drop them now.

How about the feature requests?

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Re: State of the Marketplace

sebi wrote:

d72B, this thread has always felt to me like I'm being "grilled" and pressured into responding, with periodical reminders of my failings.

I am not quite sure I am comfortable with the level of transparency (on a public forum) that some of these questions require.

Sebi, I want to preface this by saying I love deckbox, and just want to see it grow, but as the creator and only person that we can ask questions to, we kinda deserve some level of transparency. Hell, even a bi weekly, "Hi, guys, I am still working on this and this issue. Still incoming." Instead we get an "Ok, ill look into it, and then no response.

Re: State of the Marketplace

valdor wrote:

Sebi, I want to preface this by saying I love deckbox, and just want to see it grow, but as the creator and only person that we can ask questions to, we kinda deserve some level of transparency. Hell, even a bi weekly, "Hi, guys, I am still working on this and this issue. Still incoming." Instead we get an "Ok, ill look into it, and then no response.

It is difficult to answer and discuss everything on the forum, email, support tickets and trade disputes and still have time for development and others... so sadly I cannot report and respond everything all the time because there simply is no time...

Re: State of the Marketplace

sebi wrote:

It is difficult to answer and discuss everything on the forum, email, support tickets and trade disputes and still have time for development and others... so sadly I cannot report and respond everything all the time because there simply is no time...

...because you're trying to do everything yourself. We bugged you to allow your community to help support the site in the past...

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Re: State of the Marketplace

d72B wrote:

...because you're trying to do everything yourself. We bugged you to allow your community to help support the site in the past...

We did have moderator support in the past, for the old BTR system, but it is not a golden solution. Moderators need to be chosen, and decisions need to be reviewed, and admin systems need to be developed for them to be able to have enough power while not enough to just trash the database and leave, or scam people and leave, or ... etc

Ultimately someone needs to have the responsibility, and that is whoever is contractually obligated to Deckbox, in this case it's only me, since it's a 1 employee company.