In Development: Trading Post Pre-Approvals

A common issue I know many have when it comes to creating listings on online platforms is that a trader will pay for a membership, submit their listing for approval, and receive a rejection. This results in a lot of frustration for the trader, who then requests a refund, which results in frustration for those who run the platforms.

We're making efforts to cut back on this scenario from occuring, such as with our service type pre-checks. However, in order to cut back on that frustration even further, we've been looking into creating a pre-approval process. We're still working out the details on this one, but the idea behind it is that you can get a pre-approval for your product or service before purchasing Sapphire, that way there'd be more certainty that your listing would have a final approval.

This would be open to members who are Sapphire Eligible (you'll know when you are as you'll get a trophy for it) and you would have to simply submit a portfolio of the work of your highest level package rather than provide it to us directly.

As I mentioned, we're still working out the details of this one, such as whether or not we'd charge for pre-approvals ($10-$20?) and if the pre-approval means you can skip out on delivering the top-level package to us entirely. As we progress with this, we'll look into creating our own forum suggestions thread to ask for feedback on this before setting it live.

In the meantime, if any of you have any thoughts on this, feel free to mention them here!

I appreciated your new ideas and look forward to seeing how they work once officially implemented

Are we going to implement a peer review process of some sort as well? Especially for services that the staff might not have a full grasp on.

This sounds like a really good idea, Z

That's really a Nice idea.. @Zwielicht

Nice, love it.

I had to put this on hold, but this is something we're still looking into.

When we do implement this, we're also looking at temporarily requiring submissions to go through this process for all members who want to submit a listing. However, we'll keep it fully open to submissions for those of you who are Founding or Platinum members, so you'll be able to just submit listings the regular way.

I'll keep everyone updated on this as we go along. As always, feedback on all of this is always appreciated.

Some of you may have noticed a new section: https://officeoutlaw.com/forums/pre-approvals-submissions.106/

This section isn't open to submissions yet, but those of you who are Sapphire Eligible (check your trophies as you'll have one telling you if you are) and those who already have Sapphire membership will be able to submit threads in this section once it's opened.

What's taking so long with this is that @Impulse and I needed to code all of this from scratch as no existing add-ons accomplish what we want. I've also come across some other possibilities to develop a proper Trading Post, such as adding in a reviews tab for verified customers (we just need to work out there verification part, but there is something I'm looking into for it) and a star rating system. In regards to the latter, I need to find a way to prevent this one from getting abused.

I'm considering doing a beta test for the pre-approvals and submissions section at some point. I'll post a thread about it if I decide to do this, but one thing I want to be able to test is allowing users to submit a portfolio for us to review instead of submitting a top-level package. This won't be available for every service, just those where it makes sense to submit a portfolio of past work.

Those of you who participate in the beta testing will not have to pay for the listing if it's approved. This also applies for those of you are just Sapphire Eligible, but you will be expected to have Sapphire membership to have the listing go live.

Nice. I had thoughts about having a sales thread at some point. Nice to see that it's coming.