Marketplace category

Or we could use topic templates that automatically add text to every #market post telling readers to contact the poster via PM and explaining how new users gain the right to send PMs.

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@TobiasF why do you think that questions and interest should be public? It only concerns the two people involved. Replies have the disadvantage that it bumps posts to the top that have no general interest. Also, if two people offer a FP1, and then a third person links the two to make it clear there is a price difference doesn’t sound to me like a nice or needed function.

There is the problem that brand new people on the forum can’t send PM’s. But maybe that is also a blessing: we have no way of vetting people or knowing who they are. So maybe it is a good thing that people need to be somewhat more part of the forum before they can bid… or is this to protective?

That is indeed an issue. Ideally I’d see people changing the topic title and add something like [SOLD] to it.

Is this even possible once the topic was closed?

I don’t think it’s an issue of whether the topic was closed. But users until a certain trust level can’t edit posts after a while at all - I guess including topic titles. Regulars on the other hand can always change topic titles, even if they didn’t create the topic.

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Just to get this clarified because it was not definitely clear so far: For the time being, it is not possible to keep the marketplace posts from showing up in the “latest” view, right?

I’m asking because I think this problem is actually the reason for closing all individual marketplace posts. And while I fully agree that they should not flood the “latest” view, I also see a perception problem with closing the posts: A closed marketplace post might convey the wrong impression to readers that the item was now sold.

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Questions should be public because they can be interesting to other people. It should be avoided that different users ask the same questions.

Interest should be public so a potential buyer can see if he can expect a success or if there are many other interested persons and he probably won’t get the item.

No. A third person should not link two sellers to each other. He should only answer if he is interested, but don’t want to pay the offered, but a lower price.

A third person can answer in “wanted” topics to link to “sell” offers if the seller did not do it.

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Can we change the name of the #market category to “Marketplace (Unofficial)”? At the moment it looks like this:

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Good point. Changed it!

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No sadly we haven’t found a way to do this yet. If you happen to find a way on meta.discourse.com, please let us know! I agree that it be better to leave them open, if we could hide them from the latest topic view.

Maybe… but then still we’d have to be very strict to keep topics from going off-topic. I have seen fora where people start discussing if the price is right, or discussing alternative products that would be a better buy etc.

I think the market should be simple; you should only react if you are genuinely interested in buying or selling so not to waste the other persons time. Probably 90% of these questions and answers are only relevant to the people involved in the transaction.

Also, if I look at other 2nd hand markets online, there is almost never a public discussion section.

I think this can very well be achieved, and is best achieved in a direct conversation between persons.

Also here I really miss to see the need for this third person involvement. If you want to sell your Fairphone 1, maybe it is a good idea to first have a look in the section wanted if there is someone who wants one. And the other way around.

Sorry if I am not understanding what you mean. And I think that we could test a more open response system as soon as we find a way to hide them from the ‘latest posts’ stream.

It is probably not feasible and way too much hassle, but I’ll just say it nevertheless: Is setting up a second forum solely for the marketplace possible? (Could settings just be copied from the primary forum to make it less work to set it up?) Of course, this would only make sense if that second forum could be linked in such a way to the primary forum that would make this “marketplace forum” well visible on the primary forum.

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We’ll first see how the current setup works and what is going well and what needs improvement. But if we would setup an entire new website for just a marketplace purpose, I’d go with software that is meant for that and not forum software. Maybe this tip might proof a good one:

The only thing that I am unsure about with bidhub if it allows people to bid, buy and sell without Fairphone as middle man…

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Uff, I see a lot of people offering phones with broken USB port, while this isn’t too hard to resolder by a good repair shop. I fear that a lot of those motherboards will be dumped because many people are solely searching for screens.

Can we somehow add a short note about broken USB ports and how to fix them?

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The problem is that more screens are breaking than mainboards, especially when the broken Micro-USB ports have been repaired. As then many FP1s with broken screens will not find a new screen, the complete intact rest (also the mainboard) will be dumped. The only solution would be new FP1 screens, but I doubt that they will ever appear.

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We are now almost one month down the road with the new market place. What do you all think?

Any recommendations or ideas for improvements?

Is there the possibility to automatically send them an email after a week or so, asking them to edit the title (tag?) if they are no longer searching for a business partner?

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And the #market category is here! :slight_smile:

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Should we create a new market sub-category for #groupbuy’s?
Obviously posts there should not auto-close after an hour.

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Can you explain what groupbuys is and why it would be useful to have it as a subcategory?

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Maybe we should rather use the term “community orders”, rather than group buys (Wikipedia). In the #wearefairphone world, they mainly serve to split the high shipping costs among multiple people.

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