Topic: marketplace order approval?

right recently had a really shit time with a guy on the marketplace.

Basically i hadn't updated prices in a week and due to the recent spike in card prices. Unfortunately this buyer from the states bought cards from me at half the price they should be. I contacted the buyer and told him the situation and he got aggressive telling me i should have been on top of my listings and demanded that the cards be sent. Im not a power seller or trader by any means but the aggressiveness i received was not very nice. i refunded the buyer and that was the end there. i am now awaiting my first negative feedback because of this .

What i propose is an option to allow all sales to be pending till i manage to get to them and check they are all 100% much like a trade.

Also an update to the FAQ explaining the sellers and buyers rights when a sale is started.

Many thanks

Jonny

Last edited by 1423235468 (2016-04-25 21:27:03)

Re: marketplace order approval?

I disagree with this. No other online marketplace uses a feature like this and I don't think Deckbox should either. You are responsible for keeping the prices for your cards up to date.

Re: marketplace order approval?

Kammikaze wrote:

I disagree with this. No other online marketplace uses a feature like this and I don't think Deckbox should either. You are responsible for keeping the prices for your cards up to date.

No other online marketplace encourages users to both maintain and mass-price their inventory in the way that Deckbox does.

OP is out of luck, but I've long maintained that Deckbox isn't TCGPlayer and shouldn't be trying to be TCGPlayer. The "hack" to do what the OP wants is to just set shipping at $1000 and instruct potential buyers to open orders for discussion, at which point he'll provide a $1000 discount. This isn't perfect but it will stop the sort of order he's worried about.

I only keep about 100 or so cards listed for sale whose prices I can watch relatively easily. Listing your entire collection is pretty risky since a lot of your sales will essentially go to vultures that are just trying to pick off systematically-underpriced cards.

Last edited by 9700377 (2016-04-26 13:25:15)

Re: marketplace order approval?

9700377 wrote:

No other online marketplace encourages users to both maintain and mass-price their inventory in the way that Deckbox does.

Ebay and TCGPlayer do. You list something for sale on ebay, price spikes, someone buys it for the price for which you listed it, you're sol. That's just the way it works. If you list an item for sale and someone buys it for that price, you can't be mad about it.

It's common knowledge that price spikes routinely occur around major tournaments. Set your account to vacation mode until the tournament is done and the spikes have happened, then adjust your prices and turn your account back on.

You can't be lazy about adjusting your prices AND expect to be protected from price spikes. You get one or the other.

Re: marketplace order approval?

TCGPlayer and Ebay do not provide easy tools to new users that allow them to list tens of thousands of cards at algorithmically-generated prices with a couple button clicks. This is something that Deckbox makes easy but also very risky.

Re: marketplace order approval?

Of course it's risky. People can't just expect that the mass price tool will take out all of the work involved in maintaining appropriate pricing for all of their cards. That's ludicrous. But that doesn't even matter. OP could have had 1 card listed and we would be having this same conversation.

Re: marketplace order approval?

I don't think so, because I think it's less-reasonable to expect the OP to maintain thousands of price listings than it is to maintain one.

If it's pretty much always a bad idea to use the mass pricing tool then that says something about whether the feature should be improved.

Re: marketplace order approval?

9700377 wrote:

I don't think so, because I think it's less-reasonable to expect the OP to maintain thousands of price listings than it is to maintain one.

Of course it's less reasonable, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. People are lazy. If OP wasn't using the mass price tool and was manually entering the prices for his cards than I have 0 sympathy for him. In that case it's 100% his fault for not updating earlier or temporarily putting his account on vacation mode.

On mass pricing: You can't just mass price your entire collection and expect to be covered if one of the cards spikes in value. You listed the card at that price so you have to be ok with that price. If you're not on top of updating the price that's your fault, not Deckbox's. I will concede that the mass pricing tool isn't perfect, but for listing all of your bulk it's super convenient and I believe that's what the original intention for the tool was.

Re: marketplace order approval?

The big stores also reserve the right to cancel orders that have been made immediately after spikes.

It should be no problem to simply cancel and refund. There will be a small paypal fee that is annoyingly not returned to the seller, but aside from that, it is well within the right of the seller to cancel. It is true that buyers might then leave angry feedback, but the spike occurrences should be rare enough that this should not influence the score too much.

That is at least my view on the issue.

Also feel free to use the report tool for blatant cases of users that are just trying to clearly take advantage of price inconsistencies. We do not look kindly on those kinds of "predatory" practices, and I will email warnings for repeat cases.

Re: marketplace order approval?

sebi wrote:

The big stores also reserve the right to cancel orders that have been made immediately after spikes.

It should be no problem to simply cancel and refund. There will be a small paypal fee that is annoyingly not returned to the seller, but aside from that, it is well within the right of the seller to cancel. It is true that buyers might then leave angry feedback, but the spike occurrences should be rare enough that this should not influence the score too much.

I think you're underestimating the impact of having just one negative feedback.

Also feel free to use the report tool for blatant cases of users that are just trying to clearly take advantage of price inconsistencies. We do not look kindly on those kinds of "predatory" practices, and I will email warnings for repeat cases.

This is actually a bit dangerous to say in an unqualified manner. The buyer in this situation is someone familiar to me - he's bought from me under similar circumstances. Basically, if a card starts trending up in price Deckbox will be slow to update and he'll buy these cards off of users who pegged their prices to the lagged Deckbox prices or who haven't updated their prices yet. This isn't exactly predatory (not like the guy who tried to trade for all the mispriced Polukranos copies a couple years ago), but it does illustrate why the Deckbox market is very risky for casual sellers - there's the dream that someone will come and buy all your bulk, but the reality is that instead people will just buy the cards that you've priced too low and this will lead to salty interactions.

My guess is that this sale in particular concerned Dark Petition or Seasons Past or one of the cards that went up in price by 500% during the Pro Tour. The OP had probably pegged his prices a couple weeks ago, so when some card shot up from $1 to $10 the buyer came in to snag all the underpriced copies on Deckbox. I don't think it's wise to punish buyers for this, but it sucks for sellers. Marketplaces like MCM and TCGPlayer have started warning merchants around Pro Tours to be vigilant in order to avoid cancelled orders. Or if you can't be vigilant, take down your cards for Pro Tour weekend.

Last edited by 9700377 (2016-04-28 15:11:52)

Re: marketplace order approval?

I agree with ^. As I said previously in this thread, I believe it is the 100% seller's responsibility to maintain the prices for their cards. Perhaps all that is needed here on Deckbox is a message to sellers prior to large events (Mentioned by 9700377 above. I can forward you the the TCG email if you want, Sebi) and another message somewhere on the site making sure seller's know it's their responsibility to keep their own card prices up to date.

Re: marketplace order approval?

+1 everything Kammikaze has said

I'll add that instead of reporting users who take advantage of poor pricing, sellers can just block them. When Sebi implemented the Block feature I asked that this also prevent users from buying from you if you blocked them. This would be after the first time they do this to you though... should we share the names of those who do this regularly so that sellers can proactively block these users?

Re: marketplace order approval?

d72B wrote:

should we share the names of those who do this regularly so that sellers can proactively block these users?

Well, if this kind of thing is needed, then I why should we allow this kind of purchases on the website at all? It would just punish new sellers, that will stop selling in annoyance that each time something spikes the sharks buy the stuff within hours.

Re: marketplace order approval?

Kammikaze wrote:

(Mentioned by 9700377 above. I can forward you the the TCG email if you want, Sebi)

Yes please, would love to see it!