v4.0: Deckbox Premium: Features Galore! (Page 4 of 8)

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.

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...

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 selling 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.

Last edited by gumgodMTG (2014-12-15 21:56:28)

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.

Deckbox
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.

TCG Player

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 Full or Partial refunds 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.

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.

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?

Last edited by renoan (2014-12-15 23:05:11)

I don't have any answers/suggestion on how to make money to support Deckbox. In this day and age, people get so much for free (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc...) it's gotta be like pulling teeth to get money from folks.

Personally, I would easily pay $20/30 a year for use of the Premium site. It's really tough to justify $70 though. Man I wish I could tell you that 4/5 people would pay $20 and that 1/5 would pay $70.

Ok, I do have one suggestion. Kickstarter (or one of those type things) for the mobile app. If you get the money, great. Make it. If not, forget about it. Let someone else do it. I'd prefer just a mobile-friendly version of the site over a special app anyways.

I have a level 3 seller account on TCG player, so I can shed some light on how their process works.  They do not charge you the PayPal fees on top of their fees,  but rather all PayPal payments (from buyers) are made to them directly and their fees are passed on to you as a seller in TCG's percentage.  Their fees are slightly less than or just on par with the combined fees of PayPal + eBay.  The money is then held until the items are confirmed to have been delivered (via tracking or x number of days).  Once the items have been delivered to the customer they will pay you for those items, but they only pay out once or twice a week meaning a significant delay between the time that you sell and the time you get paid.  They pay you by directly depositing the money into your bank account.

When you aren't using a premium service like the crystal commerce site to list on TCG player you have to list each item individually.  This is done through a very clunky interface where you search for the card you want to add, then bring up the page for the exact edition you want to list, then price each copy of that card you have based on condition.  If you want to clear your inventory you have to do it one card at a time by loading that card's page and hitting clear all prices for this card.  When viewing your inventory they do not list out these prices, so to even view what you have a card listed at, you have to bring up the page for that card. 

Then they enforce very strict numbers on how many cards you can list based on your seller level.  All the information for how this works is public on their page if you go looking for it, and doesn't seem too bad until you get up to listing more than 100 items at a time.  Keeping that inventory manually synchronized with trades on deckbox, even for a user with slow sales is a lot of work, and is the primary reason I stopped selling there.  The time investment in listing all of my cards through their interface which was not as nice as deckbox was just not worth it.   However if my primary focus were selling and not trading/inventory management I would have chose TCG player, because it is much easier to make sales there.  So the best way to compete with them is not to try to get sellers to move from one site to the other, but provide a way where they can sell the same inventory on both.

Large vendors with a real store inventory manage it with the third party tools which allow them to sell the same inventory on multiple sites without overselling.  There are at least two sources for this as they are both listed on TCG player's page about listing items.

Last edited by gumgodMTG (2014-12-15 23:45:46)

love this update!  i'm always looking online for set/expansion lists and now, here they are!

First, please ignore everyone complaining. If they don't like the services provided by this website for free they can gtfo. You don't owe them anything.

Second, the price point seems a bit high. 7/month is about the cost of netflix, and seems a bit high for something that I use more like an app. I feel like if it was a couple of bucks a month I would have no problem subscribing. Starting at 5/month and then scaling down to 3/month for the 2 year subscription seems more reasonable.

Last edited by tjdrake719 (2014-12-16 02:01:00)

I think a lot of times when people react strongly to Deckbox updates, it may not necessarily be the updates themselves but how they are introduced. For a tool that many people use everyday, big sudden changes will almost always be met with resistance.

PucaTrade recently made some big changes involving international trades. They are reserving international trading for Uncommon and Rare tier members only. The difference is that they raised the conversation in a podcast, received lots of feedback from their users, and then they sent out a mass email letting everyone know ahead of time when the changes will take place. This allowed their users to make whatever preparations they needed to make for a smoother transition.

Under email notifications, I've always had the box next to "I want to receive Deckbox newsletters" checked. I've been using Deckbox for years and have never received a single email regarding Deckbox updates or changes. I think this may be one of the things that users would appreciate. A little warning could go a long way.