SitePoint Development Blog

Users who were paying close attention over the weekend may have noticed the new, improved Marketplace Search including the more granular Advanced Search page.  We’ve been listening to your feedback and search was (and still is) high on our list of priorities for improvement.

The recent change is the first of a number of changes to come to the search tool.  You can filter results based on a number of criteria, making the ease with which relevant results are returned much easier.

If you perform the same searches on a regular basis you’ll be glad to hear that you can subscribe to your custom search via RSS to keep up-to-date with recent changes in the Marketplace.

There are more changes to come in the near future, including additional search fields (Price, Date, Buy it Now) with the next addition being pagination of the search results.

That’s all for now.  Carry on…

Amazon is having a rough weekend, with a massive outage of its Simple Storage Service (S3), which we use to store attachments within the SitePoint Marketplace. The service has been largely broken for nearly nine hours as I write this, with services predicted to be restored any minute now.

If you have had any difficulty adding or viewing attachments within the Marketplace, that would be why. Please give it another try in the next hour or so and you should find attachments to be working smoothly again.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Yesterday I posted some thoughts we’ve had about how we might improve the auction feedback system on the Marketplace. Since then, the development team has done a little more brainstorming and we think we have another good idea.

What if we keep the feedback system the same as it is now, except you don’t get to see the feedback that is left for you until either a) you have left feedback in return, or b) the time limit for leaving feedback has expired?

On the surface, this seems like it would be an effective way of avoiding retaliatory negative feedback, freeing up Marketplace users to be honest and open in the feedback that they leave.

What do you think?

Hi, Marketplace users!

Since we launched the user feedback system with Marketplace 2.0, we have been closely observing the usage patterns of the system. What we have noticed is a distinct reluctance to leave negative feedback, even in situations where a user has legitimate cause for complaint about the other party involved in an auction.

After speaking with a number of our users, we believe we understand why this is. Users are afraid to leave negative feedback because they do not want the other user to retaliate with negative feedback as well. Users would rather attempt to deal with a problem buyer or seller privately than to risk receiving negative feedback.

This has been a problem on other auction sites for years. eBay recently took the step of disallowing sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers in order to deal with this problem. This has not been a very popular move with eBay’s user base and we are hoping to find a better solution.

At this point, we are considering adding a layer of anonymity to the feedback system. Buyers and sellers would still be able to leave positive, neutral, or negative feedback about each other, but that feedback would only be visible as an average rating, and only after a user had received a certain volume of feedback (to further avoid retaliation scenarios).

What do you think? Are we on the right track, here? Would you feel more comfortable leaving honest feedback under such a system? Or would this sacrifice too much of the transparency provided by the current feedback system?

Leave a comment to let us know!

Today we have released a new version of SitePoint Marketplace which makes some significant changes to the way “End Auction Early” works.

Previously an auction holder could end an auction early and sell to the current highest bidder at any time.  We found this to be unfair on the currently involved bidders and not in the (”Going, going, gone…”) spirit of real world auctions.   When an auction holder chooses to end an auction early now all bidders and subscribers are notified by email and 24 hours are given for any final bids to be placed on the auction.  If the auction ends after those 24 hours with the reserve price met the auction holder is obliged to sell.

We’ve also implemented a frequently requested feature… The ability to reduce the auction duration once bids have been placed.  We’ve always allowed extending up to a maximum of  30 days, but never allowed shortening the duration.  From now on auction holders can change the duration of their auction up to a maximum of a 30 days, or lower it down to a minimum of 24 hours from the current time by using the “Edit Auction Details” page.  All bidders and subscribers will be notified when the auction holder makes a change to the end time.

We have updated our FAQ to reflect these changes and we hope that the changes touch a suitable middle-ground between buyer and seller needs.

Today’s Marketplace release adds a new “Premium Domain Name Auctions” category so that domain names can once again be sold at auction within the marketplace.  The “Domain Name Classifieds” category will remain in place, alongside this new category however.

Within the Premium Domain Name Auctions category, sellers can sell single domain names, one-per-auction.  Many Marketplace users may remember the old “Domain Names for Sale” category which allowed multiple domain names to be listed at auction.  For this purpose users must continue to use the classified category.

This release also includes an array of changes to the Frequently Asked Questions along with several other minor changes.

Update: The outage window has now passed. PayPal services should be working normally.

PayPal has advised us of a planned outage of its systems, which will prevent SitePoint users from making purchases (such as Marketplace credits) using PayPal for one hour starting at 12:00AM EST on June 27th.

Buyers on the SitePoint Marketplace will also be unable to win an auction with a PayPal Buy It Now bid during the outage.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Today we changed the name of the “Turnkey Sites for Sale” category to “Startup Web Sites for Sale” following a largely positive response to our previous blog post making the suggestion.

We’re hoping that the new name saves some confusion between our users.

Carry on…

Today we launched a new Marketplace feature which allows users to show off their credibility in the form of a Marketplace “Trust Rating”.

You can read more about the new feature in our original feature announcement.

One of the new key features is the ability to link a working telephone number (anywhere in the world) to your user account.  It’s highly recommended that all users do this in order to improve their trust ratings significantly.

It’s free to do, it takes abut 2 minutes and you can get started easily by visiting your profile then clicking on “Manage my Trust Rating”.

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/myprofile

Enjoy the additional peace of mind!

SitePoint Marketplace Team

We’re excited to announce the completion of a major new feature in the SitePoint Marketplace. As of the next release of Marketplace users will have the ability to show off their trustworthiness and increase confidence amongst other users.

Update: This feature is now live!

We have been working on a flexible way to allow the “trust rating” of a user to be defined. Our first implementation bases the result only on feedback history and a working phone number being linked to the account, but as time goes on we’ll be adding more ways to boost your trust rating.

Initially users will start with between 0% and 40% trust ratings depending upon their feedback history. It takes no more than about 2 minutes to boost this significantly by linking a phone number with your user account.

Here’s a little preview…

When you log in you see your current trust rating in the navigation bar

Clicking on the link takes you to your public profile with a breakdown

You can boost your trust rating by clicking through to the Trust Manager

Verifying your phone number is as easy as entering it and waiting for a call

When you receive the phone call, enter your verification code

Your phone number will be linked with your account to increase your trust rating

As you gain positive feedback your overall trust rating will be boosted

Users can see each others’ trust ratings throughout the Marketplace

This feature will be launched very soon after the weekend and then extended steadily as time progresses. See you in the new, safer Marketplace!