Topic: Small Orders and Price Spikes

Okay, this thread is going to combine a couple issues that maybe should be addressed separately, but I just got a card order that concerns both, so..

1) Today someone bought a copy of Goblin Rabblemaster from me that I have listed for under a buck. That's it. On my user page, I advise people not to make orders under $10 since they're not worth it for me to fulfill. Yeah, I could raise the shipping cost for all orders or maybe make a special cost category for small orders (would this actually be enforceable, though?), but right now I'm not sure if it would be acceptable for me to cancel the order as it doesn't adhere to these guidelines - my impression is that it wouldn't be and I could get hit by negative feedback. The buyer could have easily not seen this policy before purchasing, so I don't fault him for it, but I'd like to imagine that I could enforce clearly-explicated sales policies without risking negative feedback. Is this not correct?

2) The bigger issue is that the Rabblemaster was bought because it's currently spiking due to its unexpected performance in day 1 of the PT.  tcgmid currently puts the card at $5. I updated my card prices at midnight last night. All the copies of the card on the site from American sellers have been cleared out now, perhaps all due to this same buyer. As a seller, there is literally nothing I could have done to protect myself from getting blown out like this (well, insofar as one can be blown out on a $4 loss) short of either not listing the card or just being quicker to move on this than everyone else - in which case I guess I should've cleared out everyone else myself. As is, there's always going to be one winner and a lot of losers.

I wish sellers could pre-approve incoming orders, or at least reserve the option to cancel them within 24h without negative feedback. I understand why a lot of sites like TCGPlayer don't allow this, but Deckbox is comprised of smaller-scale traders who are probably much more-adverse than normal to these kinds of losses. I didn't complain when someone ordered a $25 Nissa from me when she was spiking to $40, because there wasn't an obvious proximate cause to this spike. But this time, I'm salty because I feel like I'm being arbitraged for not paying crazy-close attention to TCGPlayer or tournament reports or relying on Deckbox's pricing - let me reiterate again that I updated the prices less than 12h before this order came in.

Okay, I do have something that can protect me here: I can set my account to vacation mode for the next few days until things are sorted out. I guess I'll do that. But I consider that a shitty option for obvious reasons.

tl;dr version:

1) Can I cancel an order that violates the sales guidelines I explicate on my profile without risking feedback? I'm guessing "no", but imo that's a problem.
2) Can we please have some seller features that allow sellers to protect themselves from being arbitraged on price spikes, eg. having seller options so that you can approve orders before they're processed, or have a time window to refund orders without risking negative feedback? Not having these makes selling on Deckbox unnecessarily risky imo.

As is, I'll fill the order I got but in the future I'll be setting my account to vacation mode around PT events and banlist announcements, I guess.

Last edited by 9700377 (2014-08-02 23:15:19)

Re: Small Orders and Price Spikes

I agree about the small orders.  However, I agree with the site's stance that any seller's prices are what they're willing to sell the card for.  When I go to a store, I expect that if a card in the case is marked at $20, they will sell it to me for $20.  I will walk away if they then say "wait a sec, let me check this price" and jack it up to whatever the internet says they might be able to sell it to someone for.

It's rumored that SCG and other card stores do exactly what you're proposing - marking large bits of their inventory as out-of-stock around banlist and large tournaments just for this reason.  I don't personally like that approach either but whatever.

Profile

Re: Small Orders and Price Spikes

When I go to a store, I expect that if a card in the case is marked at $20, they will sell it to me for $20.  I will walk away if they then say "wait a sec, let me check this price" and jack it up to whatever the internet says they might be able to sell it to someone for.

That's fair, but I'm not running a store. I can understand if the site admins want me to act as though I am, and I'll live with it, but it's not an optimal arrangement for me. (And fwiw, if you really tried to wipe out an LGS of a $20-to-$40 card after a BR change, they probably would stop you and no one would blame them.) And then I'll have to do stupid hackish things like turning on vacation mode at certain times or making shipping categories named things like "USPS with tracking ONLY FOR ORDERS OVER $10 DO NOT ORDER OTHERWISE" to get things closer to what I'd like. And I don't think anyone's going to be happy like that. It's ultimately an incomplete contracts issue - the lack of choice means that there's deadweight loss from transactions that won't occur because people are dissuaded from listing cards because of its riskiness.

It's obviously not my call, but I don't think this site's comparative advantage lies in trying to set up a storefront of semi-professional sellers a la TCGPlayer. It's cool for people like me that just have cards and like the thought of being able to inventory them online but also use those records to trade/sell cards for incremental gains. It's a more-personal exchange environment, and I'm not sure that trying to get people to eat losses in these sorts of situations with no sort of resource (other than being the predator instead of the prey) is the best policy.

Last edited by 9700377 (2014-08-03 05:00:46)

Re: Small Orders and Price Spikes

Very good points, and a couple of questions to which I also want to find a satisfying answer.

1. You are in fact allowed to refund the buyer and cancel the order in this case. Buyers have to read the seller policies, we even have a message on the order page for this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/977cu8f5hbvgw … .04.16.png

An enforceable, setable minimum order size for shipping options is also something we have considered. There is a thin line here between customers being happy with the system, or just sellers being happy with the system. If both are not happy to some degree, the markeplace does not work. Minimum order amounts increase seller happiness but decrease buyer happiness, so I did not yet make a decision on how to make the system work regarding it.

2. Market spikiness is indeed a problem, and a hard one to solve at that.

In serious loss cases, sellers can just cancel the order and eat the negative feedback, we will not suspend sellers for refusing to accept an order, so there is always that option at a sellers disposal. Negative feedback is not the be-all end-all of a successful seller, as it is not on EBay, or other marketplaces. If someone consistently does it, then of course, it will be obvious that is a seller people will not want to do business with.

I'm open to suggestions for system features that help with price spikiness issues, and I will also think a bit more on this, but I think it is not trivial, and there will be a lot of compromises.

As always, I'm happy to read feedback and discussion on these topics, it helps us make better decisions.

Re: Small Orders and Price Spikes

I think the tradeoff between "sellers being happy" and "buyers being happy" isn't the right way to see this - if you favor one side by just not allowing the other to implement policies in its favor, then the "losing" side will just react by not participating on the site at whatever margins. It's unforced deadweight loss that presumably wouldn't exist otherwise. If you allow people choices, and determine the level of protection (similar to how people are allowed to mail with or without tracking, or with or without insurance, or whether someone ships first, etc. - it might suck if policies on this were forced!), then we shouldn't have to worry about what the "right" level of risk to be borne by the different parties, as they'll sort that out as part of the matching process.

What I'd like to see is terms of a (presumably) simple-to-implement system would just be a way for sellers to either pre-approve orders or safely (ie. without risking feedback penalties) refund them within some time period after purchase, if they choose to do so. I realize that the biggest issue is that this would create a less-smooth marketplace experience (you'd probably have to indicate to buyers on the market page which sellers were using this option), and maybe there would be payments issues and if lots of orders ended up being cancelled the policy might have to be revisited, but as is... yeah. My second-biggest worry after getting blown out by a spike like this is someone ordering cards that I just can't find for whatever reasons - again, if I were a professional store managing inventory that wouldn't be an excuse, but I'm not. I like the added layer of flexibility that exists in trades but not for sales.

btw, I cancelled the order and the buyer left neutral feedback, leaving me unhappy (at the least, it's misleading - it just says I cancelled the order, leaving out the fact that the order violated my rules.) The provided screenshot says I get to leave feedback on the buyer as well but I see no way of doing this. Can I get his feedback scrubbed (order #3246 for reference)? It's not negative at least, but it feels unfair to get hit with that for cancelling an order in the way I did.

[Edit]

The guy changed his feedback from neutral to negative. I'll be changing this into a BTR I guess if it stands.

[Edit 2]

Feedback is back to neutral and is blank. I can live with that.

Last edited by 9700377 (2014-08-04 00:32:25)