Open discussion. Any thoughts about how inactive vendors could be handled on the marketplace?
So for example, I’m a vendor, I open a title market and list some products. For whatever reason, my company goes under and I’m no longer trading.
Now let’s say a buyer comes along, sees one of the items listed, and goes ahead and purchases it. Of course, the vendor is no longer active and doesn’t fulfil his part of the transaction.
I’m guessing the basic mechanics involved in this would come from the built-in arbitration. Some basic logic on the lines of:
If the vendor doesn't update order status within x days, then return funds to the buyer - flag vendor as inactive.
Perhaps, similar to the ghost wallet discussion, some kind of keep-alive signal is required for vendors. If no activity after 30+ days (or whatever is suitable), then flag the account as inactive.
Also whilst on the subject - as we can imagine, there will be a lot of freelancers and small businesses using the marketplace. The ability to set the status of a vendor as “Holiday” or “away” which flags listings as temporarily unavailable, but doesn’t completely remove the entire listing.
So if i was a freelance graphic designer with a service being listed and i pick up a job that’ll keep me busy for 14 days; i might not necessarily want to delete my listing, but i might want to pause it or add some kind of “unavailable” flag so as not to cause confusion.
Happens something similar on a eBay, a seller can set an holiday period and it gets announced on every listing. Then the only way to avoid sending cash to an inactive seller should be a default escrow for every payment, if payment is not accepted in a time window of 4 days funds go back for example
Of course. We’d have to convert this into blockchain logic. IF no response after 2000 blocks (example), THEN return to the buyer. Then add a penalty to the seller’s reputation or whatever.
Because then we have the top-level filtering function which Dan has mentioned before. The ability to filter sellers by certain conditions (reputation, location, category).
A feature I like on localbitcoins is when you hover over a user name and it shows their activity status, for example “typically responds within 30 minutes”. So maybe in a vendor profile it could have brief information such as “active daily”, or “not logged on for 5 days” etc.
This would be alongside having the ability to manually set some kind of “away” status as suggested above.
I think a function like “last logged in” would require the vendor to perform a blockchain action, which will cost the vendor SFX. So every time the vendor logged on, it’d cost them a small amount of SFX so their profile on the blockchain is kept up-to-date.
It might be possible for the marketplace software to check which was the last block this vendor performed an action of some kind?
I definitely think its a good idea to have parameters to keep listings active. It wont be a good first impression if someones first time using Safex market and all its cluttered with a bunch of inactive listings.
Off the top of my head I would imagine something like…
In order to keep your market active:
Need at least one transaction every 3000 blocks.
If no transactions after 3000 blocks pay fee of 100 sfx to keep title market active for another 3000 blocks
If your market goes inactive you can reactivate for 200 sfx at any time.
When market goes inactive no transactions are possible to be made and will not show up in search engine. All listings become unavailable.
Obviously this would need to be listed somewhere for people to see before they make a title market. I would think people might try and buy some popular names for title markets just to see if they can sell later. Names like Tesla, Apple, Amazon, etc. This speculative name title markets should definitely be ghost.
How about letting vendors set a shipment time visible to everyone. if they say they ship within 3 days they have to be online and keep alive every three days, if they say they ship in 14 days they have to give a keep alive message within 14 days.
If everyone can set their own rule which is visable to the buyer it should be in an acceptable range for different businesses
If they miss one keep alive message just mention it within the page without deleting anything. if two ore more are missed mark them as inactive and don’t show them in normal search, but only if someone searches for inactive vendors aswell.
For Holiday mode vendors should also be able to choose if they still want to sell with the message shown how long the holidays are and when the shipment is to be expected then or to close the sell function.
I would not delete anything to fast, it can be a lot of effort to list everything and you would be quite unhappy if you as a small buisnessman have an accident lay in the hospital for 6 weeks and when you come back and want to continue you have to list everything anew, it’s way more convenient just to reactivate the deactivated account.
Yes, no need to delete a listing, since you can not delete it for real, just change it’s status, would be enough to display a message if the seller fails to communicate he is still on
I suppose we don’t need to over complicate the process here. The more IFs, ANDs, ORs, etc, the costlier it gets for the user.
The less having to POST data to the blockchain, the better. The majority of this could be handled locally by the client itself.
The client will have downloaded a big list of vendors, and the products they are selling. Some basic mechanic in the client to check WHEN was the last activity of the vendor (any activity at all) and filter or flag any that are over X amount of blocks.
That won’t cost the client or vendor anything extra and puts less strain on the blockchain.
Then for the away/holiday scenario - a simple action accountable on the vendor to flag the profile as “away” will simply just allow the marketplace client to filter out any vendors with this flag activated.
We could easily avoid the problem of inactive vendors/auctions if we let run auctions only for a specific amount of time.
So for example if you create an auction or list a product you have the choice of about 3 days, 7 days or 30 days. Technically those would be calculated in block numbers. So even if the vendor goes inactive the listing will go offline as well as soon as the time expires.
Combined with the pay back option if the vendor doesnt confirm the payment it should be no problem anymore.
Suppose I am a food seller, and I made my listing of artisan pasta, I would like to sell such product for more than 30 days straight and not having to remake such listing over and over, imagine a big seller having to deal with the inventory… you could auto relist those items, but being an human action would result in a downtime. nobody likes downtime
Perhaps it could be implemented that a vendor must make a sale within x amount of days. You wouldn’t want anything too strict. But perhaps a vendor must make a sale every 6 months, this would encourage promotion of their product, Safex itself and push more sales. After the allotted time if the vendor hasn’t made a sale they would be flagged as inactive.
Could it be handled by deactivating listings and/or vendors if the vendor has one or more pending orders that has gone unfulfilled in some number of days? I would assume the transaction would have a status called “shipped” after being initiated by the buyer, so it should be possible to detect if orders are going unfulfilled for a particular item.
Could there also be a cost associated with maintaining an account that would disincentivize people from going inactive? I kind of like the idea of having to lock in SFT to maintain an account because there’s a cost associated with that, namely the SFX they would be collecting if they weren’t locked into a seller account.
Am I missing something. I would have thought that there would be thousands or millions of people selling one off items that they no longer need and like ebay keep their account for long times and sell maybe 1 item every 3 or 6 or 12 or 24 or 36 or… months.
I like the idea of a prove active or when last edited
We already do this on many platforms: when you edit, or post, or ping something it is like a bump.
So like this you can have a filter if updated this week and you only see listings that were pinged for a small cost of sfx. It might be insignificant but can be a major filter for finding reliable sellers.