Skimming the BST threads today, I had a thought that has probably crossed a lot of other minds about "what if we had an actual exchange system".

What I mean by that is something akin to Nucleo Exchange (a precious metals trading platform) or the actual stock market, where effectively all "buyers", rather than having a BST thread, submit standing (or time limited) offers of what they are willing to pay for a specific game.  Similarly, sellers submit standing (or time limited) offers of what they are willing to accept for a specific game.

Then you have a one-stop shop to see all available offers, on either side of the trade, for any given game.

Similarly, since NAge already has some profit mechanism from link-throughs to eBay and Amazon, you could consolidate fixed-price links from those sites to benchmark the high-water-mark on the selling side of the trade.


This would actually lead to innate price charting capabilities, where you would actually have information for selling/buying volume and actually market prices for everything.

Also, theoretically, it would make the overall market more efficient, and massively cut down on the possibility of making an ill-informed purchase, since at a glance you'd see all available copies at all offered prices, or as a seller you'd see all available offers and decide if you wanted to sell.


Probably a MONSTER to mechanize something like this, but it would be a HUGE draw to the site if it worked and could effectively replace fixed-price auctions and sales at other locations, in the long run, if it was done correctly.


I guess for a lot of things this might be a "shipping kills the deal" scenario, though :/   but if there was a general agreement when using the platform of "bid + calculated padded envelope shipping" it could probably still work.

I have thought this too. We have the collection utility, why not expand it to show what people have for sale. So users could search a game they need in their collection, then see which NA users have that game for sale. Would be an awesome improvement.

Yeah, part of the thought came from Jonebone's discussion about bounties and whether they are helpful or bad for the buyer.

This sort of platform would theoretically optimize both sides of that problem.
You would occasionally find a great deal if you were quick, but in general, you would at least know you weren't overpaying for anything.

One huge flaw which is the same reason a sealed price guide or CIB price guide would never really work... condition.

Most buyer assume a certain level of condition in a bounty. If I "WTB xxx for $100", I'm probably expecting slight wear. I wouldn't want to be automatically synced with a seller just because he offered his torn label up for $80.

Making the marketplace more efficient is a great design in theory, but simply not practical. It also would eliminate the thrill of finding good deals. It's a great feeling to be first in a thread with awesome prices.

Well, I wouldn't expect the system to literally auto-complete transactions like a true stock market trading platform.

It would probably automatically offer transactions, and let the buyer confirm if the condition was satisfactory.

In terms of how price-guides, etc, would work, in my mind, for condition-sensitive items would be that you would basically show an error-bar that spanned the condition spectrum. Granted, whoever is doing the guide will have subjective influence of what they actually thought the condition was for completed deals they aggregate (or maybe you take a "vote" from the buyer/seller and average their opinion on what the condition actually was for an item)

We've kicked this can down the road a lot in the past. The thing I keep coming back to is needing a "committee" of highly dedicated people to work together to "spec out" a full idea. Everything from a-z, including schematics, screenshots, wire-framing, etc. The way I see it, that's probably the only realistic way to pull off a solid marketplace feature on a small site like NA. I can build it no problem, but I just don't know *what* to build. Any takers? It would probably need a team of 5-10 people, each with some reselling experience.

I really want to build a z-shop-style system on NA as well, which would give each user their own storefront, tied together with a single, searchable community interface. This could also tie into a system that cross-checks wanted lists with available lists. That was the original intent behind choosing the type of collection when you create one using the collection tool, but we never did build out the pieces to put the two together (enter the marketplace, that Dangevin and I started brainstorming with...).

Well, that's better than an outright shoot-down of the idea

No promises on timeframe, but I might take some spare time over the next few months to flesh out an idea for peer review.
If somebody else beats me to it, then they beat me to it.

Jonas got the wheels turning about condition, though, and I grant that it will probably be the biggest sticking point for a one-stop-shop approach.

I was going to do something similar on one of my websites, and here was the idea:

No B/S/T forum. Each user gets their own "store front". When they list something, they pull it from the database (eg., Super Mario Bros. CIB). They then can mark the condition based on "Like New, Used but Excellent Condition, Used, and Heavily Used" (of course, this could be refined a little further). Each user also has a "Wish List", where they pop in what they're looking for (Earthbound Cart Only, Mega Man 2 Manual, etc.), and when it becomes available, it shows up in their "Want Feed". Of course, the store fronts would be searchable as well. Past that, you could even log the sales of each item and display an average of what the item has sold for in the last X transactions (if money was exchanged). Once some data has been collected, it would be easy to incorporate trade values into the average as well.

This would alleviate the need for Buyer and Seller forums, no need for thread bumping, would be significantly easier to manage, and if someone started screwing people over, they could easily have their rights to a store front removed, as well as "hey, I don't like Nathan. He wasted my time. I'm going to prevent him from buy/looking at my store front".

Not sure if this is something that other people would want implemented here, or even close to what you were talking about, but that's my $0.02.

^^^ That is actually a much more realistic way to implement it, than what I was suggesting. I like it.

Sounds a lot like something GameTZ has going. Users can browse how many of a certain title are available, they can see who has it, they can add it to their wish list, want list, etc.

I think it would be a fun project.