v4.0: Deckbox Premium: Features Galore! (Page 5 of 8)

I understand the need for money in order to pay employees and have oter resources for this site, but what you are offering is not something I am interested in paying for. That being said I do like the site and will continue to use it in the free fashion and am considering setting up a seller account.

Noone expect you to do the work of 10 guys.

And that wasn't AsymptomaticPyrexias intention - He said, that maybe it's a good idea to go to your community tell them your ideas and get their feedback beforehand!

I don't know how long you worked to get those new features rolling - maybe three to four months? There was time to make a newsletter or a forumpost of your thoughts you are going to do - thats about 10 minutes work or so.
Maybe the community would lead you to a better solution, maybe not - but you would have them informed, that something will need to change or deckbox will be gone. And that would be a smart move to do so.

Now you are stuck here with the premium service for 7$ a month. Sure, for a couple of guys those 7$/7€ won't hurt (btw. do you $ guys  pay fees on top of those 7$ ?) but for the most of us it's the question of netflix/hula even a draft of about 3-4 hours.

And again, it was your choice to implement those features - not the community ones cause you didn't asked the community. An API for deckbox was a long wish, you wanted to make money out of it and make an app on your own.

Hi,

I have rarely posted here, but I feel a need to post.  I am a business owner.  I have owned many businesses over the last twenty years.  The first thing any business needs to remember before doing anything, is that the business they "run" is owned by the users of the business.  If the users are not willing to pay $20 for a new DVD, they wont, no matter how hard you push it and say it is better than a cd, and you will go out of business.  This is currently the big issue blue ray is having in the market place, hence why blue ray movies are coming back to nearly the same as their DVD counterpart.  It is especially more important in an online business.  You can choose to set a price point that might get you one person in one hundred take up the offer.  Or had you talked to your community about options your community would have spoken back.  They would have given suggestions, you could have collated the suggestions and then acted on the most accepted suggestion.  You did none of this, this is poor business management.  Honestly, right now the reaction that your community is screaming at you, not asking, is your price is way too high.  Any good business person listens very carefully to their community.  Walmart do not put any item in their store without first asking people if they will buy it.  If they won't it does not go into their stores.  I know you have already put the cart in front of the horse by not allowing community input, but right now you need to try and get that cart back behind the horse.  The only way I see this is 1.  remove all costs (temporarily) 2. speak and ask your community of their thoughts.  3. given a small amount of time collating the information from step 2, then offer a vote on the top 3 - 5 options talked about.  Do not think at this point you get to choose the most expensive or best for you. 4.  once you have your votes in set a date to implement it and give notice. No sudden surprises.  5. Watch more money roll in than you would get any other way.  Sometimes les means more.  Hypotetical, if you offer the premium at $10/year and lets say every member takes it up that is $770,000 per year.  Or if you offer it at $84/year (current option) and 1 in 100 takes it up then you only get $65,000 per year.  I know not every person is going to take it up, but this just shows how less can be more.

We all love this site, we all want this site to go on, we all want you to get paid for your services.

Just my thoughts, from a very successful business person.  BTW I have learnt this lesson before in one of my first businesses, so I have real world experience.

As a frequent user and supporter, I have spent time providing feedback on the site and I have enjoyed quick responses and even quick bug fixes. But recently I feel that my feedback has not received any attention - so I stopped giving feedback. That being said, here's some now:

As a seller, I feel that selling desperately needs improvements... and none have been made in months!

• What is the state of the Deckbox pricing algorithm?

• I would likely pay for Premium if it allowed me to set dynamic prices.

• I can't set static prices based on a filter. [https://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=22334]

• I can't enforce a minimum order size (# cards or $). [https://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=22333]

• I can't automatically apply a discount. [https://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=22333]

• I can't set it to require my approval before an order goes through.

• I can't enforce a rule for buyers to choose certain shipping options, i.e. forcing them to pay for tracking under certain conditions.

• I can't give feedback on buyers so we can weed out the bad ones as a community.

• It's hard to fill large orders since I can't sort the card list (my cards are not sorted as one giant alphabetical list (same goes for filling trades).

• It's really difficult to determine if the buyer has left feedback or not.

• I can't see the tracking # I gave the buyer.

• Shipping options gets difficult to maintain the more you have.

• Since you haven't improved the Marketplace or asked your community what you can do to fix it, it seems like it's dead/dying.

On building the Deckbox brand...

• Another idea for making money: sell Deckbox-branded merchandise, e.g. t-shirts, sleeves, playmats, DECKBOXES, scorepads, pens. Maybe only the strongest supporters will buy it, but it will also help get the Deckbox name out there to players at LGSs and kitchen tables.

• Give some sort of bonuses for building up user scores. People love "leveling-up"! This could mean free Premium, exclusive subforums, etc.

• Communicate better. You don't have the time, so get volunteers to do this for you. Send out the missing newsletter and have a presence on Facebook and the like - especially Reddit!

Maybe this has changed, but to get custom sleeves is one of the reasons that PucaTrade had to do a kickstarter type project.  At the time they had to order a pretty large quantity in order to get their brand on them.

Chessex will make custom dice.

Last edited by gumgodMTG (2014-12-16 14:06:35)

The answer to this question for me is simply the Mass Card Entry and Cart Optimizer options that TCG offers. I would love to devote 100% of my Magic budget to Deckbox, but buying a decent number of cards (10+) is simply much, much easier and faster on TCG.

And in reference to the posts above mine, I would absolutely buy Deckbox deckboxes, sleeves (if good quality, see: DragonShield, KMC), and for sure a t-shirt.

Last edited by Kammikaze (2014-12-16 14:31:16)

If the cost of premium remains what it is, I would love another way to support the site like this merch.  I would definitely buy "Deckbox" deckboxes or supplies.  I really want to support this site as I find it great.

I accept this. However, your original point was that "we don't want to be competitive." We do. It's just costly, and if pegging to Deckbox's algorithm doesn't make us competitive than this is something that Deckbox should be working on. If Sebi wanted to jack marketplace sales he could just lower the Deckbox price on all the cards, although sellers might end up happy if this does lead to pricing that's substantially below what sellers would like or have come to expect.

I'll also note that one risk for sellers on Deckbox is that people are very savvy at blowing you out if any of your prices are slightly-behind a price spike or if some class of cards is cheaper on Deckbox for some reason that other sites (iirc shocklands used to be unusually cheap here.) This leads me to slightly-bias my prices more on the high side than I would have otherwise. I wish I had the ability to unconditionally cancel an order within 24h of its being made... I guess I could try to outline that on my profile page as a policy, but I could see people being unhappy with it.

One thing I've noticed is that I used to make lots of sales on here but recently I haven't made any. I haven't changed my pricing strategy. Am I to blame? Is the marketplace more competitive (eg. it's attracted outlets like adventuresON)? Or are prices just too high? I don't know. My comparative advantage isn't to know. I came to this site to trade and selling is just a neat value-add but not something I want to devote tons of energy towards. If marketplace sales are falling across the board (are they?) than perhaps this is a site issue.

Last edited by 9700377 (2014-12-16 18:07:44)

Deckbox needs and deserves our financial support. Please try out the new features for the free 7 day trial period and if you do not feel the features are worth what they are asking give some constructive feedback. It's already an amazing place to trade even if you don't pay for extra features so jumping ship does no one any good.

A mobile app sounds really exciting. I too think a one-time purchase for $4.99 would fatten your wallet. I would also buy up some Deckbox merch. As for the current pricing of Premium, I can't afford it.

You can already basically do this, actually. A buyer can make a proposed order and then ask for a discount to make it "competitive", and the seller can apply that discount. Maybe some people don't know about this feature, though.

What you suggest touches on one idea that I found cool before, though... that users should be able to specify buy prices for cards on their wishlist similar to how you can have sell prices for cards on your tradelist, and then sellers would be able to reach out to buyers directly.