Sitepoint has a new system
Hi all,
A month ago or so, Sitepoint as launched their new marketplace system. They claim that they worked on that more than a year. For those who didn’t visit the site lately won’t be surprised by the change. The changes are minor and you need to have a careful look to see what’s new.
So what’s new?
1) the look - is seems to be cleaner - not a huge difference - a different font, the upgrade listing has moved to the left- that’s it I think. Overall it looks better.
2) Sorting - you used to be able to sort the auctions by ending time. You can still do so, but then it gives you all the auctions that have been already ended. Why? I don’t need this information. Now I have to go to page 5 to find the ones that are about to end. Sorry but this is stupid. In 2-3 month time you will need to go to page 15 to find this information. Just remind you this is an auction site, so the ending time is one of the most important information. Now they buried it. Huge disappointed.
3) Buy it now - According to the new system when the reserve price is met the buy it now disappear. This to encourage people to use the buy it now. I don’t like it. As a seller I prefer to have a full control on the sale and not use artificial rules.
4) Conditional bids - Now you can submit a bid with condition - something like : I will bid for $400 if you can send proof of income. Again I don’t like it. This is something that the buyer should ask before he bid.
5) Legal binding - Sitepoint claim that now if you sell a website and there is a winner (if you didn’t reject his bid) you must sell the site to him. Likewise if you are a buyer you must buy. This is good but I can’t see how they will monitor it. It is not E-bay where they have you paypal account and your personal details. Anyone can open an account bid not pay and disappear.
6) Feedback - Buyer and seller can leave feedback on each other. It is one of the things that were missing in the old system. It is too early to say how it works on the new system, but it is a good news to have it.
These are the major changes. The bottom line is a bit disappointing. Yes there are some good new features, but it seems to me that Sitepoint are afraid to go all the way and have an auction section like ebay. Why? I am sure they have the answers.
April 10th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Thanks for your feedback.
1.) Buy it Now bids now remain through the entire auction based on feedback we received.
2.) Conditional bids are entirely optional. When you create an auction you have the option as to whether or not you want to accept conditional bids on your site - and they do make a lot of sense for Premium Sites.
I agree with you 100% that ideally the buyer would conduct due diligence before bidding, but in the real world, this doesn’t always happen. With conditional bids at least they are forced to spell out their conditions as part of the bid, and the seller has the option of accepting/rejecting the bid.
This prevents sellers from bidding, sending an email with a long list of conditions, and the seller not having the option to accept/reject the bid.
3.) The next major improvement will be a user verification system. This will increase transperency and trust even further.
4.) The other “under the hood” improvement is that the entire marketplace is now hosted on an elastic computing cloud at Amazon. This drastically improves performance and allows us to scale.
The entire back end code - several hundred thousand lines, has also been re-written, allowing us to do adopt a “rapid release” model - with frequent improvements and feature additions, which is exactly what we’ve been doing the past couple of weeks, at a rate of about one new software release every 1-2 days.
April 11th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Thanks Matt for your feedback.
This is why I like Sitepoint very much. You are always listen to the users and always try to improve things. Well done!
I can’t wait to see the user verification system. This will take things to the next level.
One suggestion is to have better search function. This can be very useful. And please bring back the sorting by end time. It is so important!
Assaf
April 11th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
We’ll definitely be changing the search function & I’ve submitted your request regarding “sort by ending time” to our development team.