Silk Road forums
Support => Feature requests => Topic started by: pestlepete on July 26, 2012, 12:28 am
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Hi admin et al,
I had some ideas I thought might be helpful for vendors; I'm sure some of them will sound ridiculous once they're typed out, but oh, well. Mainly they are all about increasing the control over stealth listings. If something (or a recommendation for it) already exists, feel free to think I'm an idiot, but also please point me to it so I can use it!
1. Enable creation of a Public listing while in stealth mode.
reason: Let's say a vendor has plenty of customers for his standard products, and he uses stealth mode to sell to them. He doesn't want to increase customers to the point where he can't serve all of them; if he gets too many customers for his inventory size, it's basically a lottery whether they can buy his goods, and all the work each party did to build trust is wasted to some extent. However, let's imagine this vendor gets hold of a new product that he wants to add to his inventory, and that this new product would have an inherently different customer base. The vendor could either: (a.) Make all listings public and either cancel orders of current products by new customers, or accept that the customer base will grow and some customers will go without; (b.) go public, but make stealth listings for all old products, and message those listings to every current customer.
2. Give vendors control of who sees their listings while in stealth mode (also stealth listings) by creating customer lists (e.g. "share this listing with customer list 'DMT'"). Share listings the same way fans see listings now (and make 'fans' a selectable customer list).
2. Alternative: For stealth listings, have a textbox for "share this with", but manually enter customer names (but you might forget someone! more of a temporary step)
2. Alt2: Allow vendors to approve who gets to add them as a fan, or to view fan list. (meh)
reason: If a vendor is selling to a certain customer base, she can't know which of them added her as a fan, so in order to make sure they all have access, she messages all of them with a stealth listing once, and again every time she adds a different listing for the same product (e.g. if she wants to add a price break for quantity [side note: automatic preset price breaks would be awesome, too!]). This is annoying to customers: because they don't want to be bombarded with ads, and on the other hand they may have to dig through old messages to find the listing link, plus they can't ever delete that message which links them to a transaction (I know the customer list itself would be a privacy issue, but I thought I'd propose it anyway). It's annoying to vendors because they have to send all those messages, and they may miss a customer who hasn't ordered recently enough.
Another choice for her is to use stealth mode. She can see that she has roughly the same number of fans as customers (arbitrarily), but she knows some of the fans have never made a purchase, so she guesses 90% of her actual customers are fans. To prevent the other 10% from missing out on her listings, she messages all her customers (annoying the 90% along with some of the 10% who don't like that type of marketing), suggesting they become fans. Then she can only assume that they actually become fans, and if they don't, they simply don't get her stuff anymore; also, she advertises to customers who added her just in case she has something they want with no prior dealings (although that's not a big deal because they probably 'fanned' her before she went stealth and based on her profile advertisements).
My vote is the customer lists as in '2'. Is the privacy issue too much, though? I mean, being on a list isn't any worse than becoming a fan, is it? And it's certainly not worse than having an actual transaction history (though that only lasts 30 days?). Perhaps some sort of hash thingy could prevent the actual account names from being extracted from the list, but still allow the site to deliver the listings to list members.
EDIT: Also, secure customer lists on SR could eliminate any cause for vendors to keep their own lists, and any reason for not deleting old messages.
I know this stuff takes work and I'm not sure how hard any of this would be (since I don't code), but these are some things I thought would be nice for vendors re:stealth listings. Anything else? Feedback? Thanks,
Peace
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2nd that! great idea..
We want to create a list of fav customers for special listings etc ...but not in our own systems