Created a new market tool to match up buyers/sellers. Thoughts?

The link: https://getgamegold.com/

Hey guys,

So I've been toying with some ideas about how to improve the experience for the typical buyer and seller of MMORPG gold.

Right now I think that the experience isn't very good: whether you're buying or selling gold, it's hard to find the "perfect" counterparty in the transaction. You basically have to go through each person's thread, figure out if they support your payment method, try to find out what price they're buying/selling for (which often requires actually talking to them to get an updated price), and then you have to figure out whether they're actually trustworthy enough to trade with.

I think that as a result, people often end up with a suboptimal partner who either doesn't offer the best price, or may be a risky trade because they have no feedback. This is because nobody really wants to go through each thread and spend a lot of time. So due to this, I've implemented a beta proof-of-concept that applies the well-known idea of comparing merchants to something that most of us here do, which is trading gold.

In order to get all of the data that I mentioned, like merchant prices, reviews, and so on, I've come to the idea of having all that be submitted by the community. Eventually, I plan on creating incentives so that people will do so.

Right now I'm hoping that some people can help me beta test this site and provide their feedback so that I can fix bugs and improve the user experience. Eventually, I hope to grow it to the point where it can truly help people trade gold in a simple and efficient way.

Here's the site: https://getgamegold.com/

 

seems like it's complicated

 

Yeah, I think my explanation is bad but the idea is pretty simple. It's just a tool that matches up buyers and sellers (similar to the Sythe marketplace), except I make it easier to find the optimal partner to trade with by exposing the prices and showing you the best deal instead of you having to go through every merchant yourself.

Right now it's obviously not much, but I think that after I spend some time refining it more and growing the community, it can become the leading place to search for where to buy or sell gold.

If you have any input about what I can do to make it easier to understand though, I'm all ears!

 

This is actually a really neat tool, I just looked around on the site. I'd be interested in helping out if you need it. Hit me up!

 

I like the website look

 

I'm always looking for people to help me out. Right now I'm in the phase of beta testing the site, meaning I need help finding bugs, suggesting new features, and populating the site with data.

The biggest thing I'm lacking right now as far as data goes is that I need to go through the existing merchants in the market forums and add them to my site. I've added like 11 myself as a test.

If you're serious about helping me out, let me know and I'll add you on Skype. I don't have much to offer, but I'd be happy to create a custom rank for helpers that will provide future benefits when I implement "premium" features.

Thanks! If you ever have any feedback to provide, let me know and I'd be happy to hear you out.

 

Site looks good, if you need any help with security or database help give me a shout.

From a brief look the only thing I'd suggest for your actual release is a more condensed search result. Too much information is on display and if you've got potentially 500 people resulting from one search it's going to be chaos to search through.

Prioritise ( Online Now, reputation ) in your `order by` result listings.

Just show their name, rep and a button to either speak with them directly or go to their merchant website etc.

 

By all means, I welcome any attempts to pentest the site .

I also agree with you about the search results. I think I need to condense the information a bit, especially for the search page as it is now. For example, I display the various games and payment methods the merchant offers, but this isn't really needed if the user has already defined their desired payment method/game.

I also do have a sorting feature, but by default it sorts only by best price. The issue here is that I don't really have a userbase, so there aren't many prices reported yet, which means the data isn't as meaningful. What I think I should do is sort by multiple criteria by default (price, then by reputation, etc.) and also let the user define their own sort criteria at the top so that they can still find merchants with the best reputation or whatever they want.

Great suggestions! I'll work on them ASAP after I finish a feature to "brand" the merchants with a pictures to make the search results look nicer.

 

Very nice tool. Makes a lot of sense. Simplistic but that really is the key now so it seems. Good job.

 

Would be better if it actually grabbed the going rate from the sites to compare too!

 

Yeah, I think on the buying side that is definitely possible, since merchants do post accurate sale prices on their site. It's a bit of a tough problem though, since it'd require interfacing with the merchants in some capacity, so I'd probably have to write some sort of daily job that would scrape the html for each merchant and find a price for it.

Ideally though, I hope to get to the point where the site has enough market penetration that merchants will actually update their own prices on my site. My far-off goals actually include the ability for merchants to create a storefront directly on my site, so that'd be nice

 

What you also need to consider is monetising your product. It's no good providing a service like this, for then the user clicks through to their website and makes a purchase with nothing going your way.

For application you could monetise with ads and affiliate. Let's say a user wishes to buy 100M for $100, then you should be seeing a cut of that if your search resulted in a sale.

 

I certainly do have some monetization methods in mind, though I'm not yet sure about which I'll end up implementing.

The easy:
* Ads for anonymous users (this is nice because it also provides an incentive for users to register)
* Featured merchants: The idea here is that merchants can rent out a spot to be featured at the top of the search results for a given game. It'll be clearly marked, and users will still be able to then sort by whatever criteria they want.
* Donation/donation with incentive: this would just be a way for users to support the site, and I'd probably include some incentives like larger page sizes (for when there are enough merchants that pagination becomes necessary), a donor title, etc.

The difficult:
* All-inclusive merchant platform, including things like live chat, customizable store fronts, etc. This would be optional of course, but merchants who pay into this platform would have a lot of their work cut out for them.

So yeah, I think that I'll definitely have options here, but all of them rely on a good, working product and a large userbase. That's just what I'll have to work on creating I suppose

 

Might be difficult to continually gather prices from various sites. Possibly some sort of bot that goes around various sites order forms to find out the different prices, and records them in a list for you to update every day or so? Not sure.

Only problem with these kinds of sites: reviews can be rigged. Whether it's from one of the goldsites paying for more and better reviews, or whatever means, it's going to be tough making sure those reviews are legitimate.

 

Well, the first problem should be mitigated with a large enough community. At the moment, I allow anybody to submit price updates for a merchant. I think there will definitely be some abuse because of this, but I think rolling out the service slowly will allow me to think of ways to prevent abuse when I see how it is being done.

The second issue I also agree with. In all honesty though, I think the same issue exists on Sythe and other marketplaces as well. In my case, I eventually hope to implement a trade verification page where both the buyer and the seller can mutually agree that a trade has occurred. In these cases, I can at least promote reviews that have been verified so that there is a bit more authenticity. There is of course potential abuse here as well, but rest assured that I'll be doing my best to create a service that is as accurate and transparent as possible.

 

Scraping should work, theoretically for the most part.