man-man Posted:

So… if I wanted to be a bit of a male reproductive organ about it, I could commission a bunch of marbles then order the stuff I want? Oh wait, commissions are the ones you aren’t promising to always accept, I suppose that defeats my cunning exploit.

If you wanted to buy the Marbles for a million Flezz apiece, I’d be happy to oblige. Log in to see images!

man-man Posted:

Even so… the system here seems backward – orders seem like the premium service that have to be earned, but you say you’ll just notify if and when you come across the item, whereas commissions you’ll hunt it down. Sounds like commissions are quicker but orders are cheaper… what if I’m an excellent customer and I want something in a rush, but for cheap?

When you make a commission, what you’re effectively buying is my time and my forum visits. Those forum visits could have been used to make myself money, so naturally if I can make more dough pwning the forums I want I wouldn’t be taking commissions at all.

When you make an order, what you’re effectively buying is the discount. My time/forum visits are my own again, so the net charge for that service becomes 0.

As far as rush jobs go, that’s what the commissions are for. If you really need something that badly, you’d be willing to pay more money to get it ASAP. It doesn’t make sense to need something stat but not be willing to pay list price when it’s available. That means it wasn’t really all that essential in the first place. If you don’t want to spend a ton of money, or can’t spend a ton of money, and yet need the item quickly, then that’s when you’d pwn the forums yourself.

man-man Posted:

If I was making such a system then I’d have a low-priority “If I happen across it” level of order, where I then notify the person, and put up an auction, then the high-priority “I will go and get you one of these” level of order where they pay more, but get more bumurances.

IMO that system can be a rip for either seller or customer. If we go with my current pricing, there’s no pressure on me to get your file in any reasonable amount of time, and it would be both faster and cheaper to just go to Kyoubai! and bid in a generic auction. If I instead discount the orders, then I won’t make any money at all, and people will only place orders and never make a commission. There’s also no balance of favours that would incline them to be repeat customers. I wouldn’t have to take all orders, but people could still abuse my system.

man-man Posted:

A further problem: expensive moars have low buyout-limits on Kyoubai. With Pink Floyds as the example I know well, the maximum allowed buyout is about 15-20% of normal selling price. In my hypothetical system this could be solved either by letting the market decide the price (but that’s not so good for those high priority orders) or by asking for alternate forms of payment in exchange for setting a low buyout price.

For those orders, I’d simply set the maximum BO and that would be the whole of the discount. As you can imagine, I want to avoid a bunch of people using orders to request nothing but Floyds or make surprise requests for Floyds (say, make 3 commissions of good value but then request a Floyd which actually results in a net loss for me). There might be another rule I’ll add to the order list to curb such abuse. I haven’t thought of one fair to both high and low level characters yet.

For commissions it’s not a problem. I’ll just set a high reserve. If the item was already over-priced and wasn’t bought by the person who requested the commission, they still get commission credit and I earned more money than I was supposed to.

man-man Posted:

Also can we ask for quotes? I want the Incredible Hulk video file but there’s no point you hunting it down if it’s going to be priced beyond what I’m prepared to pay for it.

The quote system is worked into the commission negotiations. Once a price has been agreed upon, I make give you a receipt then go off to work.