Topic: Possible trading improvements

I just love this site. It has been great for allowing me to organize my cards and much more.

Over the last 9 months I have been using it to arrange trades. While it always a good tool for helping to enable trades, it could be improved with a few minor changes. It could be made fantastic with some major changes.

My greatest frustration is trying to find people to trade with. My approach at the moment is to find a card I am looking (or possibly looking to trade away) and then to look for people with the card in their tradelist or wishlist. I then try to find people with enough overlap in tradelist/wishlist to warrant a trade. However, there are a lot of people using deckbox who have no interest in trading or only want to trade within their country or locally. Despite this they all show up in the list of people with a certain card in their tradelist or wishlist (i.e. some people uses these lists even though are not "traders").

Some minor suggestions  that would help:
1) Allow a profile option to indicate no interest in trading.
2) Do not show (or give option not to show) users whose range of trades does not include your area in the "using have <card> in" list.
3) Show the number of completed mail trades for users in the "using have <card> list. Just this would reduce the need for the first two items as I could not look at users that have never traded by mail.
4) Allow users to specify countries they are willing to trade with. I live in Canada where postal rates to the US are not much more than domestic. However, my only choices now are within Canada or worldwide. Of course this is of limited use #2 above.

Other changes that would help with trading:
1) Fix the prices. I know this is coming (really soon, right?). I am hoping that when the new version comes that the price listed a card with no edition will the lowest price for the card not the weighted average over all versions that is there today. The lowest price has a good chance of being right. The weighted average is never right.
2) Suggest possible trades. That is, provide me with a list of users, who I have indicated I am willing to trade with and vice versa based on location, for which there is significant overlap between our wishlists and tradelists. I suspect this is could be a big work item and expensive in terms of processing. Perhaps it could be done by request only, executed as a background task, that the user could check back on later or with the results sent out by email.

Re: Possible trading improvements

Thanks for the input, good ideas!

Showing trade score in the 'users with card' is a good point, we'll do it for this release.

We would really like to have a "suggest trades" section. We already have one for people in a community, they see on their page some suggested trade partners. We had this for worldwide and per country too, but as you suspected, it got really slow, and we had to take it out.

There are smart ways to do this, and for a trading site it is almost mandatory, but they're not trivial smile. We just didn't yet get to it. After the current release we'll try to draw up a plan for one, and post about it in Announcements to ask for some feedback.

Re: Possible trading improvements

I would also suggest adding the function to allow people to determine how many trades a person has before it shows on your list. I am tired of looking for a card and all the closest people have 0 score and no wish list