Changes to B&S discussion - SOLD BUMPS ARE BANNED - Page 5

Well it's only clear if you would just edit the post and mark it as sold. Then all the "n00b" buyers who can't read your mind (I have bought many things from ancient threads) will stop bothering you.

I do not agree, I like to test the water first if I saw something that I believe is a good deal for SF members. I take a gamble by purchasing stuff that is not my own size, so I would like to ´test the waters` first.

I voted they should not be banned, but after reading this thread I change my mind. I think listings should only get bumped for price drops to maintain fairness and fresh listings. It is annoying to see the same old threads over and over again with no changes and have new threads buried several pages deep.

+1

But one man's lame bump is another man's discussion, and it would be a LOT more work for the mods.


OK, what I mean is this:

If you're posting a single item, say a used item, you have much less invested in its sale. The item is already in your wardrobe, and you will tend to be fairly flexible on price, being more interested in shifting it than achieving a certain price. If you're posting a large haul of NWT items from an outlet, or a wholesaler or other contact, you've invested a significant amount of money and so will be more interested in achieving a lot of sales within a narrow timeframe and at a certain "reserve" price. This is all fairly self-explanatory.

Now, on the B&S board, sales partly depend on visibility/presence of your thread. Threads with many NWT items are naturally at a disadvantage in a forum format, being outnumbered by single/low items threads which push them down rapidly. Allowing "sold bumps" brings multi-item threads back to the top at the expense of the single-item threads. This balances out the the numerical advantage of the single-item threads, thus creating what is to my (admittedly biased) mind, a more level playing field.

If one couldn't use "sold bumps", an obvious - and clearly horrid - way to counteract the effect would be to have a single thread for each individual item being sold, and stagger posting each thread by an hour, to maintain high visibility in the board, and link to all the disparate threads in the OP of each separate thread. That would create a vast sales presence on the board. It would also be spammy in the extreme. Clearly, such a blatant abuse would lead to mod notifications, and be shut down, but it's really easy to envisage more subtle forms of this behaviour to game the system that would be much harder to consistently police (cf the practice by some of "pics later" or "measurements later", both of which I personally dislike and do not use currently because of the ability to use "sold bumps").

I firmly believe that the most USEFUL sales format to both buyers and sellers is a single thread per seller (at any given time) with a large number of items in that thread. But to make that format effective relative to a single item thread, you need a way of maintaining visibility and "sold bumps" are a simple, self-regulating way of doing this. I say self-regulating, because you're inherently limited in the amount of bumping you can do, because you can only do it when you sell an item! So if items are not selling at all, you can't bump, and have to price-drop instead. It's actually quite fair.


True. But I also think us sellers should "play fair". Now, my definition of fair will differ a little from someone purely interested in buying (I should point out that I've bought my share of items from here too!). But I think allowing sold bumps for large multi-item threads is a small concession to sellers, that on balance does more good than harm. From the perspective of sellers, mods and actually buyers too (in terms of encouraging those threads).


The last point also refers back upwards to the buyers too though. Sellers will naturally prefer a system that encourages a higher price for their product, buyers will naturally prefer a system that encourages a lower price for items. This is not wrong; in fact it is the essence of a good marketplace. And most of us are BOTH buyers and sellers, to greater or lesser extents. What we're discussing is how to BALANCE the marketplace since the format inherently imposes certain distorting restrictions to the way the market functions. Some of those distortions are beneficial to sellers, some to buyers, some to both, some to neither. I think allowing "sold bumps" is beneficial to high-value, high-item sellers; moderately beneficial to buyers in terms of encouraging those sellers to post items first here rather than elsewhere; and moderately unhelpful to single-item sellers. Personally, I find that a useful balance.


Of course. But what we're talking about is where the tipping point is, whether/how much it would move by such a change, and whether moving the tipping point by making this sort of change is a good thing for the board. I would say not.

Believe it or not, the items were marked sold. Several of the bumps were for "Can you get a size 42" and that type of thing. They weren't my threads, in that case, but I've had instances where people bumped one of my mine to ask if the item was sold even when it clearly said "Sold."

My personal feelings remain that prohibiting "SOLD" bumps would be to the benefit of this forum.

With that said, though, I recognize that this is a gray area, and not a black-and-white/right vs. wrong issue; Holdfast's post above amply sets forth the reasonable arguments for the other side.

I guess what I'm trying to say, ultimately, is that this isn't a question of "reasonable people will recognize what is right", because there is reasonableness on both sides.

Quoted for emphasis. When I offer a haul of NWT stuff, I price it to move. I don't build in premiums just so I can do price cuts. I'd rather sell the stuff and get it gone. But if my thread gets knocked off the front page because of some spammy n00b, or because some other seller bumps 15 threads at once, I don't have much way to regain my lost visibility. So my options are either to charge more -- can't imagine that would be popular -- or simply decide it's not worth my time to sell. Lately I've been finding myself in the latter camp. ("The Purge" threads are largely stuff I bought previously and stuff from my own closets.) As it now stands, the system is weighted toward sellers who ask huge premiums, then gradually do 3-5 percent reductions. Personally, I'd like to see less of that and more great deals. Maybe we should cap the number of price reductions to encourage better discounting? Five or 10 price cuts should be plenty, I would think.

Anytime this sort of discussion comes up, I think we ought to bear this in mind: The harder the forum makes it for sellers to sell NWT stuff, the less NWT stuff we'll see. Considering I don't buy used shirts, trou, etc., I don't like that at all, either as seller or as buyer.

Well since this is a discussion thread your point isn't really good, but I still lol'ed. Good one.

I generally don't agree with Holdfast's argument as I don't see anything valuable that a "Sold" post accomplishes as compared to simply editing the OP apart from getting a thread to the top. As a buyer, if I am interested in an item I will bookmark the thread and keep a track of it. I don't need a "Sold" post to make me aware that an item is not available anymore. An edit works just as well. However, if indeed there is some merit to allowing "Sold" bumps for threads with large # of items then maybe a threshold for the # of items should be applied? 5, 10? I don't know.

Also to add to the discussion, its not as if sellers putting up a large # of NWT items can't game the system. You often see someone list multiple items and then every 24 hours reduce the price on one of them. This causes multiple bumps to the thread with literally one round of real price reductions for the items.

+1 i'm purely a buyer and sometimes i have a hard time sleeping at night cause i'm worried sellers will start using ebay instead ok, not that extreme but you get the picture. recently sellers were saying they were having more success on ebay (quicker movement and higher prices). thats not good for the B&S buyers...

Poal idea : How do you feel about poals in the B&S forum regarding bumping threads in the very subfora you dont want threads unnecessarily bumped? - Ill bump a thread off the bottom with my reply, hell yeah! - See option 1

I'm not personally a fan of the "Sold" bumps, but allowing them does encourage posters to consolidate threads, which is a benefit to both the seller and to potential buyers.

In any case, we are in the process of designing a marketplace that will let the market decide the value of bumps.

Why not just allow the user to sort threads by the first post? I'm pretty sure there's a vbulletin hack for it if it's not available as a default setting. Then, as a buyer, I'm not bound by a seller's potential manipulation of the thread position. As a buyer who wants to see stuff I haven't seen yet, I've found threads move off the first couple of pages even without ICs, sold bumps, or buyer questions. I generally search for what I'm looking for and. I'd be much happier if people routinely put sizes or size ranges in the post title and used tags as much as possible. Casual browsing is fun too, but I usually don' t have the time.

I agree, and in many ways, I feel this thread is a proxy for some of the more unreasonable bumps/behaviour that sometimes happen here. The regular buyers and sellers here are all pretty reasonable but some of the rarer/newer sellers can over-game things sometimes and spoil things for all of us.


Doc speaks the motto of I suspect anyone who's ever sold an item here!


Worth requoting IMO.


Now this sounds interesting!