Topic: Request - price confirmation period

Hello Deckbox staff,

Happy holidays and a great new year to you guys. I guess the team must be on vacation because I've been receiving lots of orders for cards that have spiked in value.

I would be amazing if we had some 12h or 18h period where we could automatically cancel an order because the deckbox price does not reflect the actual selling price. Most large card stores, and even the whole of Amazon.com for example, will cancel your order if the posted price does not match the real price.

It sucks to refund customers. I would much rather be able to negotiate prices immediately during a pending transaction. I can see why this would be annoying to some sellers, so it would need to be implemented as an option.

Also, if a buyer wants to add a card to a transaction, there is no currently set up way to notify him he should propose the purchase and allow negotiation.

The past two situations have been happening fairly often as I would imagine the staff is on vacation and price spikes from spoiled cards are not being updated.

Thanks guys!

Re: Request - price confirmation period

Most large stores won't cancel your order if their prices were out of date. It's bad PR. I understand your concerns, but it's not normal to be able to do this. Let me guess, someone bought some of your Eldrazi-related cards?

I'll just pass along a "hack" that was suggested to me a while back on this issue - just introduce a really high shipping price (like $100), and give it a description that says "open order for a refund" or something. Then people will open orders for discussion and you'll give them a discount for most of the shipping price before they place a finalized order.

Re: Request - price confirmation period

Thanks for the advice! I can understand why most stores will take the loss to encourage future profits.

As for cancellations based on price, Amazon definitely does it. I ordered a projector in 2013 that had been priced way lower than it should have been. 24h after my order, I got the following email:

Your Amazon.com order of "Vivitek D952HD 1080p DLP..." has been cancelled.
Amazon.com Marketplace (payments-messages@amazon.com)  Add to contacts  02/04/2013   Keep this message at the top of your inbox 
To: -------
payments-messages@amazon.com
Amazon    Your Orders | Your Account | Amazon.com
Order Cancellation

Order #----------
Hello ----------,
We're writing to inform you that your order has been canceled. We're sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. In most cases, you pay for items when we ship them to you, so you won't be charged for items that are canceled.*

Order Details
Order #---------
Placed on Monday, April 1, 2013
   
Vivitek D952HD 1080p DLP Projector
Sold by WT-IMPORT
Cancel Reason: Technical Problem

"Technical Problem" here is that the price was posted erroneously. Most online retailers will do this, and card stores all collaborate behind the scenes to make sure when one raises its price, they all do.

Re: Request - price confirmation period

Cancellations will sometimes occur when there are obvious algorithmic errors. The issue is that I'm presuming that there wasn't an algorithmic error in the order you had to cancel - it's just that a card's price spiked and Deckbox's price was slow to reflect that (or you were slow to update your prices in response.) Most stores will stand by these orders. If you were on TCGPlayer and cancelled and cancelled an order like this your account would probably be placed in jeopardy.

Like I said, I understand. I stopped selling on Deckbox in large part because I felt like a lot of the orders I was getting was because I was doing automatic price-setting and people were just taking advantage of spikes (or anticipated spikes.) But the status quo on most sites/markets is to let buyers do this.