New Need Feedback To Our Solution For Unmaintained Sales Listings

[Zwielicht]

Hello everyone,

Many of you have asked me over the last month about what are plans are to deal with the potential of unmaintained listings in The Trading Post. I recognise that this is a very realistic issue we could face, especially since listings only have a one-time listing fee.

I've been working on a solution for this, but I wanted to get your feedback on what we'd like to do.

Okay, so I've set up a feature that auto-closes threads based on the time of the last post in the thread. It's not been applied to The Trading Post as we're just testing it right now, but it's currently set to auto-close threads that haven't had a post for over 2 weeks.

To better explain how this works, I've created an example with three "traders" who submitted their sales listing exactly 2 weeks ago.

• Trader A has been receiving responses and bumping their sales thread every 24 hours.
• Trader B's listing went live, but they never bumped it and it hasn't received a single post in over 2 weeks.
• Trader C's listing went live and, even though they haven't had their first response, they bump it every week

Trader A and Trader C's listing would remain open as they're maintaining their listing, even though Trader C is only posting promotional bumps once per week. Trader B, on the other hand, would automatically have their listing closed since they haven't made a post or had a post in their listing since it went live.

I've set it up this was to encourage others to continue maintaining their listing. Those who maintain their listing can enjoy having it at the one-time listing fee, but those who don't maintain it would have to pay a fee to reopen it and, if it's been long enough (maybe 6 months straight of being closed?) the full listing fee as we'd need to re-test if it's been a long time. None of these are set in stone, of course, but that's the kind of thing we're thinking of putting in place.

What I would like to know is if anyone sees any issues with this kind of set up. Potential for abuse or does it come across the wrong way? Maybe we should give traders more than 2 weeks from the last post in their listing before closing it?

 

[MR.Spuf]

What happens if trader B is out of stock which happens a lot in my biz. Would I be able to reinstate the it when I get back on stock?

There are periods where I slow things with promotion since my one of my biz have monthly subscription so I might be out of stock till the end of the minth. Sometimes I sell in advance, but still I don't want to over promise and under deliver due to the fact that some clients change their mind and they renew subscription at the end of the month.

Naybe extend the auto-close for 1 month and re-open from trader side?

 

[Zwielicht]

What happens if trader B is out of stock which happens a lot in my biz. Would I be able to reinstate the it when I get back on stock?

There are periods where I slow things with promotion since my one of my biz have monthly subscription so I might be out of stock till the end of the minth. Sometimes I sell in advance, but still I don't want to over promise and under deliver due to the fact that some clients change their mind and they renew subscription at the end of the month.

Naybe extend the auto-close for 1 month and re-open from trader side?

I suppose we can make exceptions to certain sales threads, similarly to what we've done with the service-specific pricing in The Trading Post. I was thinking about adding in a grace period to have it reopened as well.

Hypothetically, if you had a sales thread here, about how long do you think you would go between promotions in a sales listing?

I can't have the trader re-open due to limitations. but if such a feature could be added in, I would definitely consider it.

1 month is possible as well. I'll think over extending the time out.

 

[t2van]

Personally I hate the 24hr bump thing. It just comes off as desperation, I know, I know about standing out but that was one of the things in the other place some sellers had army of bots and stuff was just getting bumped and what was offered was shit and some real gems fall away to the hidden depths of the forum.

Although some of these are not directly related to what you posted @Zwielicht it might spark some internal discussion or thoughts.

Some suggestions from me on how I would do things:

1. Allow sellers have the ability to change thread post tags (you know where we have "new" "under consideration" etc. I think letting them have the ability to say:
   
   Away on Holiday. Order limit reached. Open for new orders
   
   Or whatever helps sniff out some of the ones who are active and who are not.
   
   
2. I think if no post activity after 1 month the thread closes. But put a clause about obvious or "suspicion" of bumping results in closing. Once closed seller needs to re-apply fees. Lets be honest if someone can't sell something its either because they are shit or no one wants the service.
   
   It just helps clean it all up.
   
   
3. Would be nice to have another "star" system that links back to reviews or feedback from users - I know its hard to say if someone bought but if they could provide a transactional id or something and then allow to rate that seller. Having a site wide rating for sellers so its visible in both the selling threat and when they active on the forum might cut out a lot of shit and future admin / trouble shooting.
   
   Also makes it a little bit more unique to other sites and if someone REALLY wants to be part of the community and sell on here might make some people think twice. I know reviews are hit and miss and that but there is a ton of shit and scams on these kind of marketplaces.
   
   
4. Constant 24hr bumps or something just put other sellers at a disadvantage I think, people who really have something to offer have something better to do than sit and push a thread. I don't know what sort of back end stats you can have linked in but something like thread bump + views = close or open.

 

[Zwielicht]

Personally I hate the 24hr bump thing. It just comes off as desperation, I know, I know about standing out but that was one of the things in the other place some sellers had army of bots and stuff was just getting bumped and what was offered was shit and some real gems fall away to the hidden depths of the forum.

I know what you mean as I was not keen on that either. It's here on this forum mostly because traders need to be able to respond to customers, but we don't want someone spamming bump every 5 minutes or something like that. If we come up with a better solution though, we could always implement it later.

Allow sellers have the ability to change thread post tags (you know where we have "new" "under consideration" etc. I think letting them have the ability to say:

Away on Holiday. Order limit reached. Open for new orders

Or whatever helps sniff out some of the ones who are active and who are not.

We wouldn't be able to do that with the prefix feature because then I'd have to give traders the ability to edit their own threads, which opens up the potential for abuse where they change their sales listing entirely after approval. That was actually an issue on the other forum; some sellers there would have alternate content ready to go for the 1-minute they had to edit their post after it went live. Sometimes, they'd upload entirely different sales copies! Speaking of which, we need to make sure that can't be done here, either.

Anyway, you are right that having a way for them to communicate that they're away or reached a limit for their orders would be good. I'll see what we can do here.

I think if no post activity after 1 month the thread closes. But put a clause about obvious or "suspicion" of bumping results in closing. Once closed seller needs to re-apply fees. Lets be honest if someone can't sell something its either because they are shit or no one wants the service.

It just helps clean it all up.

If a listing needed to be closed manually because of abuse like that, we would leave a note. That's an internal process that will be added in.

An auto-close after 1 month of no activity is something I'm still thinking over. It does seem cleaner than doing 2 weeks.

Would be nice to have another "star" system that links back to reviews or feedback from users - I know its hard to say if someone bought but if they could provide a transactional id or something and then allow to rate that seller. Having a site wide rating for sellers so its visible in both the selling threat and when they active on the forum might cut out a lot of shit and future admin / trouble shooting.

Also makes it a little bit more unique to other sites and if someone REALLY wants to be part of the community and sell on here might make some people think twice. I know reviews are hit and miss and that but there is a ton of shit and scams on these kind of marketplaces.

Like a star system for the thread? I think I saw something that could do that, actually. It added these tabs to threads in "sales subforums" where people could leave reviews and rate the service. I think it was this add-on: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/classifieds.6703/

If you look at one of the screenshots, there's a tab for feedback for threads. However, I avoided adding it in because of the mixed ratings. Even still, there might be other ways to accomplish this.

Constant 24hr bumps or something just put other sellers at a disadvantage I think, people who really have something to offer have something better to do than sit and push a thread. I don't know what sort of back end stats you can have linked in but something like thread bump + views = close or open.

I can only do it based on first post, last post, or reply count; unfortunately. It would be more ideal to work out something better than 24 hours between self-bumps, though.

As always, I really appreciate your thoughts on these matters, @t2van.

 

[MR.Spuf]

Allow sellers have the ability to change thread post tags (you know where we have "new" "under consideration" etc. I think letting them have the ability to say:

Away on Holiday. Order limit reached. Open for new orders

Or whatever helps sniff out some of the ones who are active and who are not.

+1 to this. If that could be implemented that would be awesome, but as I see it it's custom work and don't know if this is doable on xenforo.

I think if no post activity after 1 month the thread closes. But put a clause about obvious or "suspicion" of bumping results in closing. Once closed seller needs to re-apply fees. Lets be honest if someone can't sell something its either because they are shit or no one wants the service.

It just helps clean it all up.

+1 to 1 month, it's enough for me for example to say if I am out of stock to restock and continue the service.

Would be nice to have another "star" system that links back to reviews or feedback from users - I know its hard to say if someone bought but if they could provide a transactional id or something and then allow to rate that seller. Having a site wide rating for sellers so its visible in both the selling threat and when they active on the forum might cut out a lot of shit and future admin / trouble shooting.
This one is a bit sketchy. It opens the gates to sending negative reviews from competition. How people have hoards of bots bumping their own thread, they could program those bots to harm others. Happened before.

 

[Zwielicht]

+1 to this. If that could be implemented that would be awesome, but as I see it it's custom work and don't know if this is doable on xenforo.

+1 to 1 month, it's enough for me for example to say if I am out of stock to restock and continue the service.

Would be nice to have another "star" system that links back to reviews or feedback from users - I know its hard to say if someone bought but if they could provide a transactional id or something and then allow to rate that seller. Having a site wide rating for sellers so its visible in both the selling threat and when they active on the forum might cut out a lot of shit and future admin / trouble shooting.

This one is a bit sketchy. It opens the gates to sending negative reviews from competition. How people have hoards of bots bumping their own thread, they could program those bots to harm others. Happened before.

This might be a possible solution to traders not being able to add prefixes for announcements as it allows traders to add tabs to their own listings, meaning they could put away messages or add an announcements tab, it would be their choice: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/xfa-thread-tabs-xf2.6784/

Combating potential abuse is always something to consider. If we could have verified reviews and a rating system tied to that, then we'd solve that issue. Of course, that's a hard thing to add in at this time, but possible one for later on when we have more resources.

 

[roydan]

I think that is a decent feature, but it's out of place in the current state where the trading post is not a part of the forum and that the main page doesn't show the latest posts.
1. What's the point in keeping a thread updated (or to bump it) if it doesn't show on the main page because the forum doesn't show the latest posts by default.
Now it works because we're all super invested in OO, but will that be the case once we have 100K users?

This is amplified because
2. The trading post doesn't even exist on the main page, you need to click it to access it, removing the "window shopping" aspect.



What can a seller post in their sales thread that is not a response to interested buyers, and what would posting even affect?

 

[Zwielicht]

I think that is a decent feature, but it's out of place in the current state where the trading post is not a part of the forum and that the main page doesn't show the latest posts.
1. What's the point in keeping a thread updated (or to bump it) if it doesn't show on the main page because the forum doesn't show the latest posts by default.
Now it works because we're all super invested in OO, but will that be the case once we have 100K users?

It shows up at the top of the sections and on the "latest posts" sidebar.

We might end up adding a feed as a main item on the homepage later (but it won't be the only thing on the homepage). Mainly, I don't want to give off the impression that this site is a clone of the other forum.

When we re-work the homepage, we could even look into having two separate feeds: one for the latest Trading Post posts and the other for the latest discussion section posts. I don't have an ETA on when or if the homepage will be reworked, but it is something we've been gaining interest in doing.

I'll start a separate thread on the homepage just to start getting feedback on the ideas we do have.

This is amplified because
2. The trading post doesn't even exist on the main page, you need to click it to access it, removing the "window shopping" aspect.

We were originally trying to create a separation between the discussion forums and our Trading Post, but it might've created too much of a separation to the point where it's too out of sight even though there's a menu bar link for it.

If you check the forum list, we added it back in there for now since the homepage should really be a summarisation of everything, even if it's not a giant list of threads. What I'm saying is that the Trading Post sections should be on the homepage, so we'll leave it there for the time being.

What can a seller post in their sales thread that is not a response to interested buyers, and what would posting even affect?

Some post discount codes, upcoming promotions, or they just say "bump".