Auction House Website -- Feedback welcome!

Amazing! Love to see this project.

There's an infinite number of features you could build out in an auction house website, but it's utilization lives and dies by it's inventory. "Is there enough inventory posted to be worth looking at?".

For the sake of adoption, it may be interesting to narrow feature development and focus to one subset of content, specifically content with a high frequency and audience, and do it really well. For example: If you're going to buy/sell a Red Craven, or Pink Gaia/Adv. Attack Capes, THIS is the place to do it. Or maybe bulk pcoins, etc. Understanding what that audience needs would let you develop a killer experience, and expand from there.

 

wow, that sounds like a good idea

 

Wow!! This is very cool. I think one killer place this can help, is with selling untradeable services such as chaos/white scroll services. To that end, maybe being able to list for bids in Prestigious Coins would help? This would complicate things like the concept of sorting... But maybe sellers could input a desired pcoin:meso ratio, and filters/sorting would just use the converted meso price? Though that has some problems, too...

 

Leech is a decent use case too! It would be amazing to be able to see/post leech offers for timeslots, level ranges, map ranges, etc., but I think there are some practicality issues... Long term advance listings (selling a timeslot tomorrow) are fine but not as common as immediate offers (selling leech right now!), and I think lots of immediate sellers will not remember to clean up their listings when finished, especially if they don't get offers and decide not to sell the slot -- it's very likely they don't return to take the listing down. I guess an EndDate could help with those?

Anyway, I think leech selling might be a wedge that can actually make this site popular, to draw users in.

Imagine this scenario, for a seller by ratio:

Seller, a BasilBeyond user, sells leech by making a listing (and also advertising on discord and smegas in-game, since the site currently has zero traffic...), and scores a buyer.

If selling by ratio, seller will commonly use something like https://leechcalculator.com -- simple lookup and calculation utilities that can be incorporated into BasilBeyond and leveraged to populate details for the listing.

At the end of the service, seller clicks a finalize button in BasilBeyond on the listing; this triggers a final lookup for any buyers, calculating their owed payments and firing a Discord webhook to notify any buyers who happen to have an BasilBeyond account. Or, if ML staff are trusting enough, the bot could live on the ML Discord and just @mention them there (will require more policing for abusers, though...)

Critically, this webhook will link back to BasilBeyond, where buyers will be able to see how they are expected to pay (via trade, or via FM store).

This entire workflow allows for a BasilBeyond user to sell to a non-user, and also gives the buyer a chance to see the website and maybe its potential? I think if enough people do this, leech listings will naturally become a common thing. And if that happens, there will be enough traffic to sell other things... I think it will be difficult to grow the site by focusing on item listings, where if you advertise on the site and discord/smegas, you have 0 reason to link the buyer back to the website if you happen to score the sale elsewhere (and until the site is actually popular, this will be the overwhelming majority of transactions)