SitePoint Marketplace Upgrade!

[Mark Harbottle]

As you may have heard, we’ve been hard at work for the last month upgrading our marketplace. We’ve just launched the first of these upgrades. There's a whole stack of new functionality, but in a nutshell here are some of the main benefits for buyers and sellers.

Benefits For Sellers:

1. You can now accept bids through a centralized bidding system regardless of where you promote your auction. No more bids coming in from forums all over the Web that you have to sort through and manage.

2. You can now purchase credits for the marketplace which you can use across any of our marketplace categories. Top up your account now and decide where to spend it later.

3. You can easily promote your auction on other forums (or any site) with a simple “image link” back to your auction on sitepoint.com. The image will update in real time displaying the progress of your auction. No more updating all the different forums on the progress of your auction -- your unique “auction image” will tell the full story in real-time.

Here is what the "auction image" would look like...





4. You now have full control of your auction. You can remove bids from buyers you don’t want to deal with. And you can remove comments which detract from your sale.

5. You can upload up to 4 files with each auction listing (screen shots of your site, ZIP files, text files, etc.). Save yourself a lot of questions from buyers, upload the information they’re bound to ask for.

Benefits For Buyers:

1. You can see the bidding history of everyone who is involved in the auction. No more phantom bids that seem to appear from outer space.

2. You can now browse all the supporting images associated with the site you’re buying (log files, screen shots, etc.) using the neat “thickbox” functionality.

3. The auction bidding process is centralized, so you always know who you’re bidding against. Even bids from other sites must come through The SitePoint Marketplace.

4. You can now quickly and easily find sites that you’re interested in buying with our various sorting options. Sort by “auctions that are ending soon”, or by even by “lowest price”.

Price Decrease:

Oh, we’ve also changed the price of “Sell Your Template” from $9.95 to $5.00.

Links:

To visit our main marketplace page go to:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/

To see what the listings now look like in the forums visit:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace...p?categoryid=1

To see what an actual auction listing will look like here's a test:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/1/

Hope you enjoy the changes.


We’ll post more detailed information soon about how it all works.

Let us know what you think?

[Visual Depth]

I think this is a wonderful change!

[BP2000]

This is excellent! I see some great new features which will benefit everyone involved in the marketplace - sellers, buyers, and the sitepoint staff.

Well done and thank you to everyone involved on the improvements!

[fenryr]

Sounds great! That'll make your marketplace grow even more!

[crunchi]

Very very welcome changes..

i love it..

Regards

[nichenet]

Great change, eBay look out!

[sealedsites]

It nice to see alot of thought has gone into this and all the doubters moaning at the $19.95 listing fee should now back down with all the added functionality very nice work.

[Logikos]

Excellent work guys! Kudos to the staff for this one!

[spinmaster]

nice work! thumbs up!

[Karl Evans]

Looks really good. Like the changes.

[Edman]

It looks good.

Couple of things:

1. You need a way to make sure a person can edit a bid.
2. I'm not sure if this is there, as the system just accepted a bid the same as the maximum, but I should be able to make bids lower than the max. Sites often sell for reasons other than maximum money bid.
3. When adding a comment, it goes down to part of the page marked with #discuss. This is different from the forums, and might confuse users - it should go down to the #postid
4. When adding a comment, you can press F5, and it will add the comment again. You should put in a redirect of some sorts in there. (NOTE: this is extremely annoying. Often when watching a sale, I'd have it open, make a comment, and then simply click refresh to see if there's a response or something. Now I need to go back to the listings, and click on the thread again to refresh).
5. Do smilies get parsed? The smilie just didn't parse for me. URLs do not seem to parse either, neither in the comments or the main body of the text. This can't be a good thing.
6. It looks like I got auto-subscribed the moment I made a bid (or commented) on an auction. But the link to subscribe still said "Subscribe For Email Updates" and not "Unsubscribe From Email Updates" for some reason. I had to click it twice to unsubscribe.
7. Minimum bid increments would be very nice

Other than that, looks fantastic, several times better than what was there.

[lostseed]

This looks nice but it really screws EVERYTHING over.
You should add a Sell yout Design section, what if we wanna sell somethin other than a Template that isn't for a contest?

Can we still do it the old style?

[MikeBigg]

Do all auctions have to have a fixed end date?

I kinda dislike the sniping mentality that this can encourage.

In a real-world aucton, the auction continues until there are no more bids.

Could there be something like: the auction ends 1 hour after the last bid after noon on the 3rd of July. Each bid after that time extends the end time by one hour.

Mike

[mmj]

Hi Mike,
Each bid made within the last four hours of an auction extends the auction to four hours after that bid. This is to prevent people being outbid at the last moment. So the auction effectively continues until nobody has bid for a period of four hours.

[chillz88]

Great move Sitepoint. But this is my idea and I've been wanting to make this once I completed my National Service. I even drew up some plans and send to SmarterScripts in case they want to play around with my idea. But, congrats! Great to see something I've been wanting to do being implemented!

*Give Sitepoint thumbs up!*

PS. Now I can just make use of this feature w/o having to create it. Lolx

[petertdavis]

Hi Mike,
Each bid made within the last four hours of an auction extends the auction to four hours after that bid. This is to prevent people being outbid at the last moment. So the auction effectively continues until nobody has bid for a period of four hours.

That's a very cool feature Tom.

[Dark Tranquility]

This a huge leap for the SP MarketPlace
Very nice

[Busch]

how will this effect those (like myself) who posted a listing a few hours ago and now no one can reply to that listing? will our threads be ported over to the new style?

[[ DigitaL ]]

Great Change!

[Mark Harbottle]

Busch - Your old listings will still work as per normal. Given you only recently listed if you wish to move to the new system, we'd be happy to issue you some free credits for the new system, but you'd have to re-enter all of your information. And any bids that you may have already received would have to be re-entered by the buyers. Up to you. Let us know.

[Tijmen]

Sounds like a really good upgrade.

[emkay]

This is great, but did you have to lower the prices just after I posted my sell your template listing!!! . I see the newest listing has a different interface when you view it? How do I upgrade mine to have that kind of interface?

[Pedro Monteiro]

Fantastic news!!

[Dan Grossman]

I much preferred the old system. The replies and views counts were indicators of auctions to check out. The text on the new pages is too small. The norm in Sell Your Site was to not announce an end date or buy-it-now until after a day or several days to get a feel for interest in the auction. Now you have to play it like eBay-on-SitePoint.

Also, I'm not crazy, there have been some visual changes to the rest of the forum as well? Like tiny text in quote boxes and smaller navigation at the top of the page and grey text in the navigation's second line?

[ckita]

cool,liking it especially the price decrease for selling templates