Market Discussions

Hi,

I've been thinking for some time now about a way to congregate a lot of independent manufacturers into one group that can efficiently fill custom orders. I have yet to find a decent way of doing it but I stumbled into an alternative for mailing lists like "Bulk Trading" or "Wholesaler".

Basically I used a free website to set up a database. No login is required as anyone can select a user name and start adding their items for sale. You can also come back and modify your available stock to reflect any changes. Potential buyer can easily see a main sortable list. My main issue with the mailing lists is that I hate coming back in-game after 24 hours to find 100unread mails out of which 99% don't interest me.

I set up a test run and here's how it works:

Buyers

In order to see the stock available for any seller you will access this link. and type the email: trader@eve

Sellers

A seller will access the following link. Replace Test1 with the desire username. Everything is straightforward, you can add new items or modify and delete old ones.

Of course there will be some limitation like a minimum accepted volume or value. I can use the same type of website in reverse, as a place where buyers will post what they want and at what prices. We don't need an offline Jita nor do we need 0.01ISK war. I will have to maintain the database for errors and will perform regular wipes for old data.

I'm curious to hear some opinions about this. I regret I don't know anything about web development so I can make my own site.

Thank you.

There are many problems with a system like this
1. it's out of game, so takes extra effort to get to.
2. It doesn't deliver offers to you, you have to be looking for an offer. If customers aren't going ahead and looking, you aren't selling.
3. There's no authentication, so there's no way to tell if the character placing the order is really that character or someone just picking that name to troll. Fake orders would become an issue.
4. In addition to 3, it would be difficult to stop someone if they did want to harass the list.
5. You lose the ability to format and link items in your posts.

If something like this were to be set up, and a very minimum it would need to be fully igb compatible, use seller authentication and offer something above and beyond a simple post system. Even then getting buyers to look every day would be a problem.

With the existing lists, if you miss out for a few days, you can just mark all as read, it's not much of a chore to do and you can quickly scan the titles to see if there's anything you fancy.

3-4 you could resolve with registration, though you'd need to verify they are the same person as the in game person. You wouldn't want to deal with people repeatedly signing up to troll with an infinite number of logins. You'd also run into the issue of people bothering to sign up and go out of game to do so. If you look at what happened with the bulk trade, a lot of people just didn't want to do it, which cuts down on the number of both buyers and sellers.

This all leads back round to number 2, which is getting people to use it. Sellers want to reach the maximum number of buyers as quickly as possible, but that would depend on how often a buyer checked. Would a buyer check once a day? once a Week? or would they only check if they were looking for something specific? With the mail system if a buyer is logged on, it pops up, so you get people buying through sheer chance that they saw something that took their interest. I think I'd ask people what they would think about using an external site for bulk trades. It wouldn't surprise me if a majority said they wouldn't bother, and that would certainly match the sentiment from the bulk trade fiasco.