I would also personally love for this to be a thing. I’ve had a few very disappointing experiences on eBay recently…
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Would be pretty awesome. Shame I’m still working at the moment otherwise I would give this ago.
Would be pretty simple to have an invite only membership, which would direct visitors to join here and reach a certain criteria/post count. You could also have a vouch scheme for the high rollers (The Biebers and Paul’s) if it got big enough. But ofc that would have to be decided upon by the person managing the site.
If it’s a separate entity it would probably be best Scott does it or a contract is drawn up to ensure profit % goes to E4/managing these sites and discord.
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In a perfect world this could be a thing, but we live in an imperfect world with imperfect people. The amount of moderation this would take would likely be staggering. If you have access to middlemen who act for free with full trust that is the ideal situation obviously but as history has shown us, even trusted people can take the money and run if/when the numbers get big enough for them to think it worth it to just disappear. Same goes for “newer person sends/pays first”. How many 10 post new users are going to get scammed by 20-50 post users who will just disappear? What will be the recourse? Informally and behind the scenes e4 member transactions are already happening to a pretty reasonable scale I think with people allowed to have eBay and IG links in their bio and just putting their names out there in general. Formalizing and allowing sales posts outright would just be more work than it would be worth I assume even with loads of time put in for free by various mods/middlemen.
2% of listing fee up front whether you sell or not… obviously if/when you sell that is a great price and going to a great place, but I think people are just glossing over the fact that it is paid up front and not realizing how much they wouldn’t like that. @garyis2000 I do agree with you though that this would certainly be a good way to encourage proper sale/list price.
I’ve always thought eBay gets way more hate than they deserve for what they provide. Their fees are completely reasonable given the premium their platform can achieve, the people it reaches, and the protection it provides to both buyers and selling.
All that said… if/when something like this did happen I would surely have certain items I would look to list through the platform. It is easy to say though being someone who would do none of the behind the scenes work or deal with the headaches.
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Why not make it that you have to have Atleast 3-4 badges before you can sell something
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Sounds like a great idea and I’d love for it to happen
Problem is that there are horrible people out there that will cause issues that just aren’t worth it to Scott or mods. If the site can be selective to x amount of people chosen by mods due to the users post count or known history on the site, that would be perfect
But if not, I can’t imagine all the random people and fake accounts and assholes that will bring this down. It’s unfortunate to say, but it is the reality of online world
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If this were to happen I think there would have to be middlemen for new people. I’d love for something like this to happen
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I wouldn’t mind helping out development if we wanted to get the project built from scratch as a community project 
Would be awesome if it could be a non-profit “for E4 members, by E4 members”.
(With a few proceeds going towards keeping E4, and the auction site running)
(Also, I’d feel great giving back to a community that has been welcoming in every way possible )
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There’s clearly love for this idea but the consensus that I believe the mods agree on is that e4 is not a marketplace and will probably never be one. If anything, the rules have only become more strict on buying/selling behavior here.
I dont think the the mod team is eager to take on the burden of becoming the equivalent of Ebay customer service to settle disputes. If you really want this idea to work it needs to be independent of the forum. Like a network of e4 Instagram sales accounts that you can link back to each person’s forum account. There is already a model emerging on Instagram where people pay a large hub account to advertise their items at a relatively small fee.
There have been many threads on this topic and the conclusion is always the same. Virtually every other platform that hosts some pokemon community is also a marketplace. Feel free to use those to buy and sell.
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To many whales on E4 that can outbid any one and still claim it’s a fair price.
unreal.
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A few things
- 2% would be impossible unless it’s only wire transfers; you need 3% transaction fee for transaction fees (so min 5% in case of OP)
- if you use Paypal Goods & Services, both buyer and seller are protected. You create an invoice, upload images, add tracking number, etc. and should have a super clean deal. If the entirety of the service is just this, then the fees remain nominal at 3% which is the original intent
- for simplicity purposes and trying it out, you could start with just a BIN Thread here. Just list a number of things that you want to sell and your price. It could get outdated quickly and turn cumbersome, but why not try it?
building a product is a PITA and won’t help you prove this idea out any faster. my suggestion is to find the simplest, lowest cost way of trying this out to prove if there is demand / if it works.
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Would anyone be willing to and/or would e4 support the idea of a somewhat unofficial Instagram sale account?
Either someone could run it themselves, or perhaps a fee is brokered, and there would be set guidelines that are required in order to list:
Minimum account posts, not on a blacklist, etc.
The Instagram account could even be private and require the user to be accepted to even view the posts.
This would effectively take it out of the moderators hands but does require some other folks to step in and help unless of course your able to create some sort of automation that maybe you email an account the information and it creates a buy it now post?
I could probably whip something together, but I’d need a little bit of time.
Thinking out loud here but you’d have a standard template that’s filled out and emailed to an email account, which then lists on the unofficial e4 IG page, in order to have the luxury of listing on that page you need a minimum # of posts or you’re rejected, etc.
The post would include your e4 username and buyer / seller can hash it out inside messages right here if necessary.
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I definitely get that no matter what, mods are going to get dragged into some bad apple cases, and that turns into a total nightmare. but like - you are a marketplace facilitator in this case - effectively just grounds by which to hold a trade show or flea market - not a marketplace itself. No one is knocking on Instagram’s door when a deal goes south in instagram DMs…
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I think ultimately the problem is, you really need E4’s blessing in this case, in order to associate yourselves. and I think E4 has made it pretty clear they’d rather not be involved in it… even if they gave you their blessing and you ran it totally independently, something will inevitably go south and the mods get tied up
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Personally, I really don’t want this place to become a marketplace
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The entire reason and value behind an e4 marketplace is that the buyers and sellers are curated and of higher quality than other platforms. Without this, the e4 market would be no different from virbank or instagram or any other marketplace with no inherent fees. The flaw with the analogy to a flea market or instagram is that there’s no expectation that instagram or a physical venue is vetting all the buyers and sellers that are participating - which would be the main expectation on an e4 marketplace.
One other general thing I’d like to point out is that the perceived quality of the members here is precisely due to the fact that there is no marketplace on e4. Anyone who is primarily profit-driven will not find value in e4 and it results in this natural filter for people who aren’t deeply interested in this hobby. I would argue that opening up an option to sell things here would severely reduce the quality of members which not only defeats the purpose of establishing the marketplace but also compounds the work that mods have to do to vet people.
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That’s a fair point. The lack of selling options likely weeds out some bad prospects. I would just be excited to see what some of the members have to offer for sale for precisely this reason.
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I just want trades to be brought back 
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Trust and verifying trust is very very hard the bigger the group gets…
Something I set up for a mineral collecting group is a weekly “market”. Instead of allowing buying/selling posts etc they now only do 1 thread a week, where everyone posts what they’d like to get rid of/like to acquire. And when you spot something that interests you, you take it to private chat. After a day the thread is deleted.
This way the site was still mainly discussion/collection show off focused but it also allowed members to do commerce with each other. It also made it a bit easier on the mod team.
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No it isn’t
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