Welcome to the official feedback and suggestion box for the SitePoint Marketplace. Let us know what you’d like to see, and vote for your favorite ideas, as submitted by other marketplace users.
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Officials Respond
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You're heard!
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175 votes
Integrate an escrow service
plannedI suggest that Sitepoint integrate an escrow service into the marketplace. Something like the way rentacoder has. For a Buyer, they would have to deposit funds before they could bid on any item. This requires alot of think, but it's just an idea that I think should be considered.
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163 votes
Adult sites should also be allowed for buy/sell
Every user watch porn/adult whenever he has time and i think sex is also a necessary part of our life like food, air and all. so i dont think there is any harm in allowing adult sites for buy/sell section. it will generate more business for all buyers/sellers + business for SP. (though i think they already have plenty of it. lol)
One of the primary reasons we don’t allow adult sites (even hidden from users who don’t want them) is that SitePoint staff would be required to moderate those auctions. We do not currently have any staff willing to work with adult material on a regular basis.
- Kevin Yank -
89 votes
Improved Search Functionality
startedAllow searching by category, site name, allow sorting of search results by end time.
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84 votes
Restore listing view counters
plannedMarketplace 1.0 had a view counter associated with every listing. Users have asked to have this feature restored to Marketplace 2.0.
View counters would break a lot of the caching we have put in place to make Marketplace 2.0 much faster than Marketplace 1.0. A database write on every page view could really slow things down. That said, if there is sufficient demand, we have some ideas on how it could be done in a clever way with minimal impact.
- Kevin Yank -
70 votes
Don't allow owner to delete member comments
Don't allow auction owner to delete member comments in his auctions. It should at least apply to certain auctions like domain sellings where experienced members are warning about fake domain PR's of fradulant sellers. Even if you allow them to delete the comment, at least people should see owner deleted XX comments in that auction.
We’ve been discussing this at length here. Right now, comments as an anti-fraud measure always lead us to a no-win situation. If we take the side of the commenters, we see abuse of the commenting system. If we take the side of the sellers, we see abuse of the comment deletion system.
Our approach in the short term will be to enhance the Marketplace with additional anti-fraud features that enable buyers to better gauge the legitimacy of listings (e.g. domain name ownership validation, site traffic verification, etc.).
As we do this, we will continually re-evaluate our policies on comment moderation. If it becomes practical and sensible to remove the 'delete comment' feature for sellers, we will.
Keep those votes and comments coming so we know your opinions on the subject!
- Kevin Yank -
58 votes
Automate verification of AdSense income
Many sites are sold based on Google AdSense income; however, it is difficult for buyers to verify claims made by sellers about the amount of income being generated through AdSense.
The Marketplace system should (with seller’s permission) reach into the seller’s AdSense account and pull out income information.
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43 votes
Let sellers require bidders to make a deposit before bidding
since multiple account making is not new on SP or on any other popular webmaster forum, its just useless giving -ve feedback to anyone as he is free to make a new id anytime he wants and as regarding calling and verifying through telephone number, i feel this will also not work out. for example say i am in UK and some buyer is from say Australia and he is verified by phone by SP mods or admin or whatever. he bids on my auction and doesn’t pay. what do i have to do with his cell number? do i make repeated ISD calls to him and ask him to pay?
i suggest SP should make initiatives like only those bidders can bid who deposit say like 20% of their bids to SP account which SP will pay to seller in case that particular bidder wins the auction and pays the rest to seller and in case any other bidder wins, he is liable to get back his money from SP. this is the only way to weed out fake bidders or it can be like CC verification wherein SP people should charge his CC in case he don’t pays the seller.
if some workable measures like these can be workout, SP would be the best place to work with. SP charges sellers for putting up their auctions but with no surety of being paid by bidders. Like in e-bay, if a bidder doesn’t pays, e-bay don’t charge its fees for that particular auction as seller is at no fault on that occasion.
I also ask other fellow sellers to put their valuable suggestions to counter this increasing problem. -
29 votes
Let users search for listings by username
startedCurrently you must find a user’s profile page in order to see a list of listings they have created. A link to this page is not always easy to find. It would be better if we could just search by user name.
This is actually already possible! Just type user:"username" in the search field on the Marketplace. We‘ll add an advanced search form to make this easy to discover.
- Kevin Yank -
27 votes
Show current bid price and BIN price in lists
Follow eBay's example. They list the current bid price and BIN price in the search results. For buyers, this would be very helpful in helping to narrow the results based on the price I am willing to spend.
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27 votes
Allow people to gift Marketplace Credits!
Say someone helps you in one of the coding forums, you can reward them with some of those sweet sweet marketplace credits.
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24 votes
Show a user feedback/trust level icon next to every username
startedCalculate the trustworthiness of a user based on their feedback profile and past Marketplace activity and show that as an icon next to every username.
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22 votes
a way to get notified of new listings
a way to get notified of new listings in categories of your choice ( maybe keyword related as well )
We provide feeds for each category, as well as for search results, that you can subscribe to. Let us know if these do not meet your needs.
- Kevin Yank -
21 votes
Provide a list of Auctions Ending Soon on the homepage
startedSellers have reported that their auctions only seem to get noticed when they are first listed, because once they slip off the home page of the Marketplace they are much less visible.
By providing a list of auctions ending soon on the homepage, we can give prominence to auctions as they near their end.
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18 votes
Don't Force Sellers to Sell to the Top Bidder
Right now there are a lot of auctions that have to be relisted because of deadbeat bidders who don't follow through. This wastes the time of the seller who is forced to relist and of other legitimate bidders who lose out on sites because someone outbids them and doesn't follow through. Let's go back to the old system and allow sellers to decide - it will work out best for everyone.
Currently, sellers are able to reject any bids they don’t like. So you aren’t forced to sell to the highest bid, just the highest bid you have accepted. Is this not working for you?
- Kevin Yank -
14 votes
Add Monthly Revenue AND Profit to the search listings
It would make it easier to find sites that are of interest if we could see the Monthly Revenue and Profit in the search listings. So if we are looking for sites with certain levels of revenue and profit, we can easily see it. I look at too many listings only to find that they are making no money or too little. It would be great to be able to sort the listings by these values as well.
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14 votes
Lower prices for marketplacte credits
The marketplace gets to be very expensive for small business owners and I can not afford to utilize the services very often
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13 votes
Proxy bidding like eBay
Then I can set my maximum bid price and go away and the Sitepoint system can keep raising the bid automatically as and when needed.
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12 votes
Website link opens in a new window / tab
The link in website listings should open in a new window / tab, helping everyone analyze the facts in the description. I always open the website link in a new window cause I like to compare what the seller says with the actual content in the website. Maybe others feel this way also.
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11 votes
Change the feedback system
I received negative feedback from someone that clearly wasn't very bright, he was in the wrong and has admitted so via PM. I was told that the only way I could have the feedback removed was by getting him to agree to it, however now that I've helped him and given him what he wants, he no longer comes here. So I'm stuck with negative feedback for future auctions. I think the system should be improved.
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11 votes
Add an "Invite to Bid" tool
There needs to be a way to Invite potential buyers to your auction.
On the SP Marketplace you will find hundreds of other users who are commenting & bidding on auctions.
If you are a seller, you will particularly be interested in those users who are participating in an auction related to yours.
As a seller it is in your best interest to find qualified buyers. Currently you're free to contact users via PM so it may be an advantage to use PM's to contact users who may be interested in your auction. This is successful (I know because I received new bids over $10,000 by meeting people this way) however some people will regard any unsolicitated message as spam.
There needs to be a way to facilitate this process in a more effective way.
Invite to Bid
My idea is a "Invite to Bid" tool which streamlines the process of contacting qualified buyers who may not have seen your auction. Similar to Elance's "Invite Tool" which allows you to invite providers to your auction.This way the potential buyer would receive an automated PM saying "(SP User) thinks you may be interested in his auction and has invited you to bid".
Since it's formalized, to the Seller can find qualified buyers and send them an offer to bid without the risk of being reported as a spammer.
There would need to be some restrictions of course. In fact, probably the easiest way to ensure Sellers are only sending Invites to those users who really might be interested, is to charge 1 credit per invite.
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11 votes
Factor in previous marketplace transactions for Trust!
So users that have used the marketplace before the trust feature was implemented still have some feedback of some sort.
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10 votes
Allow auctions/listings to be published as drafts
Could you insert an option to have threads within the marketplace to be published as drafts. This way I can have my friends and co-workers check over everything. Good because I often make errors.
Interesting idea! So, as I understand it, a draft listing/auction would not be visible to users of the site, but you could provide your friends and co-workers with, say, a preview URL to see it?
- Kevin Yank -
9 votes
printable
make your listings printable. due to the page script, only the 1st pages will print.
need this for my records.
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9 votes
BBCode or HTML option for formatting auction descriptions
plannedEveryone time a seller lists an auction they have to reformat and recolour their listing text. This is incredibley wasteful.
Allow us to use basic BBCode (color, italic, bold) so we can roll out new listings without duplicate effort.
A work-around that is currently available is to disable JavaScript when creating a listing. The rich text editor for the auction description will revert to a plain textarea into which you can type (or paste) HTML code.
- Kevin Yank -
9 votes
Allow sorting / Filtering by BIN
When I am looking for a website I want to make a purchase quickly and not compete. Not everyone has BIN set, and it would be nice to just see BIN when a user wants to.
Good idea! Would an icon next to auctions with BIN available be enough, or do you definitely want to sort/filter (significantly more work to implement)?
- Kevin Yank -
8 votes
more detailed feedback ratings next to a users name
I think everywere a users name is shown his/her feed back needs to be soon as 6+ 0- ...=100% feedback......I also think the 60% increase for linking your phone number is giving to much credit. Whats stopping me from going to work were my office has 30 phone lines and internet on the computers and making new accounts all the time?
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7 votes
Send New Comments Along with Email
I think it would be great if you would send along the New Comment text along with the email notification, just as rentacoder does.
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7 votes
Don’t allow deletion of info after auction close
plannedFrom a buyer's perspective, if I lose an auction, I find it helpful to see what the final selling price was of the site I didn't win. It helps me prepare for bidding on similar type sites. However, a number of sellers remove listing information after the auction closes. In an open auction, this information should be available.
We have planned a feature that will allow the auction holder to make a completed auction “private”, which will remove it from the view of users not logged into the Marketplace. This will leave it visible to the bidders.
- Kevin Yank -
6 votes
Bring Back Domain Name Auctions
plannedThe previous domain auctions worked - as we can set a price / buy it now etc.
Now all the domains are listed in "domain classified section" - the term "classified" sounds cheap and nasty - you cannot set prices and people cannot place bids etc aprt from messenging.
I use sitepoint to sell my premium domains and now i have to share the section with thecatsatonthe mat.info - either bring the domian section or a premium domain section. and if you are not them take the section from the marketplace listing!
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6 votes
Publish a marketplace International Newsletter
This is a similar sitepoint's other International
newsletters,The MarketWatch Newsletter has now been launched and will go out every two weeks. You can read the 1st issue here:
- sitepoint
http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/viewissue.php?id=6&issue=1&format=html -
6 votes
Let me only show my listing to logged-in users
Some sellers are concerned that their listings are visible to the public, even if they’ve applied the ‘Hide from search engines’ upgrade. To provide additional privacy to sensitive listings, we could give sellers the option to only show their listings to logged-in users.
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6 votes
Required Net Profit Category
We need a required NET profit category. Sellers are becoming more missleading on their website sales, they do not list monthly costs even though it is a category when making an auction. This will make sitepoint that much more honest place for sales.
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6 votes
Make Some Place For Graphic Desginers to sell thier services
Thier should be place to bid on projects and sell services and pictures on net
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5 votes
Badges for top sellers and auction holders
Create a badge or icon to identify the Top 50 holders or sellers, based on the number of listings.
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5 votes
Buyer & Seller profiles should show date joined sitepoint
In marketplace when clicking on member profiles it should also show date when joined sitepoint so we can know how new or established the member is. .
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4 votes
Allow upload of Excel/spreadsheet files to auctions
I would imagine that people might like to be able to import auction stats files to their own computers to have a closer look at them in Excel or similar spreadsheet software. Let us know!
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4 votes
Option to hide won/ended listings while searching.
While searching there seems to be more won auctions then ongoing auctions.
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4 votes
offer other payment options
Offer payment options other than Paypal. Some people have had a bad experience with Paypal and do not use them.
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4 votes
forcing buyers and sellers to leave feedback!
many people on sp dont have feedback ratings at all aside from the phone number linking increase of 60% which is to much.... force buyers and sellers to leave feed back when they log into the site if they have any bought or sold sites.
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3 votes
Validate the year and month the site was established
Too many turnkey sites are listed under established sites.
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3 votes
Non paying buyer must not leave feedback
hi admin, i would like to suggest that a Non-Paying auction winner for any auction shall not be allowed to leave his feedback (specially negative) for that particular auction for which he has not paid. whereas the seller (auction creator) may leave his feedback regarding that fake non paying buyer/auction winner so that other sellers will be bewared of that fake bidder. The genuine sellers like us will be saved in that case from false -ve feedbacks.
i would also like to suggest to create another selection box for NON PAYMENT while submitting a feedback for a bidder/buyer.
i would also like to know is, if we sellers can complaint to a mod and remove false -ve feedbacks of any non-paying bidders?
