Some of these ideas have been brewing in my head for months, and I’ve shared most of them with some of you in one form or another, most recently on the weekly CBD Twitter Space. In the spirit of the Idea Bag forum, my expectation is that each idea can be taken individually and used or remixed as the team deems necessary.
First, I want to pick on the Listings, aka secondary market:
The fact that the secondary market is cluttered with individual listings makes discovery annoying. In my opinion, each collection’s pieces should be grouped together and only shown once on the secondary market, with a price range displayed. When the user clicks on a wearable, they’re shown all the competing listings. This might help with performance too (See the bottom) in a similar fashion to paginating the backpack.
Instead of putting in a bid on single pieces, we should be able to make a collection offer, much like on OpenSea. If I want to place a bid on a wearable, I shouldn’t have to sort through a bunch of listings and try to memorize the psychology of each serial flipper. It would be nice to put in 1 bid and whoever decides to bite, gets my MANA. Under the current system, I have to either pick the seller who gets my bid very carefully, or put in multiple bids and hope only one of them bits. This is a clunky way of doing things and having collection offers would help with price discovery and liquidity.
The rest of my ideas are more focused on the Store section, or the primary market. All of these should have some sort of indicator badge, so buyers know the terms surrounding what they’re buying and have peace of mind:
Set and forget price increases for creators. One example I’ll use is DJTRAX and his helmets. He increases the price manually after a certain number of sales. Why does he have to do this manually? It would be awesome if he could set his pieces to increase by X MANA every Y sales, and never have to think about it again.
One idea that Sinful had, which I really like, would be to let creators set a fiat target price for a wearable, but the pricing on the marketplace is still denominated in MANA. I feel like this one would be controversial, but since we’re already forcing creators to pay the curation fee under identical terms, it makes sense to at least think about. This idea could also optionally be combined with the auto-increase idea, for creators who want to go that route.
“Burning” the price, or the terms under which it fluctuates. Essentially, if a creator decides to sell something for 50 MANA, or follow one of the pricing schedules I mentioned, they could have the option of locking themselves into that pricing, and take away their ability to change it. This is a risk for the creators, but would give buyers peace of mind that they’re not going to be subject to an Oleg style price rugging. I don’t think this would be a very widely used option, but I can dream. Until then, I let others gamble on the newer creators until they’ve got some releases with sales under their belts.
The ability to hide specific pieces and creators. Personally, I don’t ever want to see the works of certain Sketchfabulous creators ever again, and having controls to hide “their” work would be fantastic. Other times, I find myself wishing I could hide specific pieces for aesthetic reasons. It would also be nice to be able to hide stuff we already own.
Finally, the elephant in the room… Speed. Let’s be real, Droffo gave us a taste of what the market could be. It allows searching by color and it runs circles around the official marketplace. I’m sure it would be a great undertaking, but fixing the marketplace and making it generally faster would be a good, measurable goal. I realize that there’s going to be some level of variability with the blockchain side of it, but that shouldn’t affect why the front end for the market is so slow, as Droffo has undeniably demonstrated. We already have fiat on-ramping for the normies. They’re going to have higher expectations of the marketplace than we do. Every scrap of e-commerce research going back to the beginning of e-commerce supports my thesis on this one.