sorry, but it's true...

what is it with sellers who don't respond or leave their ads active for up to 2 YEARS, without indicating whether it's SOLD?

isn't there a way for ads to expire after a certain time? or at least a notification system to remind sellers to do SOMETHING with their active ads?

as a buyer, it's very frustrating and annoying seeing product you want, but noone is answering the call on the other end.

 

I agree with that! I have pm'd and emailed several times and just finally gave up. Also, make sure you check the sellers ratings, i think I might have been screwed...

 

i totally agree... there has been a few time i thought i found some cool useful stuff only to find mysefl waiting for a reply and just said skip it... i'll check somewhere else or it was sold... that should be revisited cause i'm sure we're not the only ones..i like the expire idea. that would really clean it up more and keep things fresh, not to metion how many more visits NAM would get from those once and a while'rs.

 

and what makes me scratch my head the most is that this is supposed to be an ENTHUSIASTS site, where we're all supposed to be on the same team, yet it's treated like a rest stop or some porta-potty site where, once you finish your "business", you have no further obligations, like taking it down (flush) or stating that it's SOLD (wipe).

how do you check seller ratings? will we be able to rate them if they're deadbeat sellers who don't respond? that might wake a few people up...

 

From what I can gather, you click on the sellers item from the list. Under the sellers description you see the black bar that says "For Sale By". Look on the right hand side and click on "Contact Seller". A page will appear that shows + and - feedback. Click on "Submit Feedback" and go from there. I plan on doing this very soon.

 

thanks for that

 

i say maybe even skip the whole 'sold' part... why would i want to look at a part i cant even get, if i wanted a catalog i'll go to the vendor part. sold never got me anywhere but a head ach.. lets do it like craigs list.. if it doesnt sell in 7 days, it gets deleted, if it is sold instead of saying sold, take the darn thing off and move on! and i like the whole rate thing, thats what i read when i buy on ebay... if there feedback sucks thats usually telling you something..

 

The Mods and folks are working to clean up the Marketplace.

Your complaints are quite valid. We're working on it, we swear.

 

Dude... your awsome.. thank you

(like the Rage 'quote' by the way... but its nice to be heard too )

 

Thanks for the patience guys, working on it.

 

can i make another suggestion? shoot me a pm if you get a sec..

 

I'm not sure what the big deal is....

If you send a PM or email to the person selling and don't get a response, don't fret, move on.

Chances are the product is sold, the person doesn't care to respond or it's an old ad... regardless, the end result is the same. No response, no sale.

I find things in old ads all the time. I send them a PM asking if per chance the parts are still for sale. If I don't get a response, I assume they are sold. Of course, I wouldn't send someone a PM asking if a part was for sale if it were TWO years old!!!

How hard is that?



Mark

 

for obivious reasons i totally understand what your saying. if i'm not mistake though this thread was under site feedback and thats what this was. dont take this the wrong way but an add thats still posted that is 2 years old.... should not still be posted, bottom line. and i have practice what you mentioned often and have moved on, only to get a call a few weeks later saying its still up for sale, sorry i dont check it often.- too late pal- either way, it clogges up the who point, IMO, of the market place. if there are things that are 2 years old, they shouldnt be on there then or make em freshin it up or more enticing by a repost. if no one wants it, then 'move on' with listing it and try something else. if you visitied the market place its filled with old adds and SOLD adds listing there product.. you have to sort through the mut to even find an authentic add for what your looking for in some cases. i only suggested making it a little more useful instead of just a storage part of the site for extra parts. having the add expiere will keep fresh posting/ listings up or even simpler, make it auto delete when its changed to sold. maybe give the option of a 1 week add, 1 month add or 3 month add, then it gets deleted for no activity.

also keeps people logging in to NAM because if they were serious about listing in the market place they would need to sign in and repost if it expired. who knows we may even get some useful information to share again from that process.

at what ever rate they know and are working on it...

only my opinion... gotta get back to work

 

Mike,

I understand and agree... Ads should be automatically deleted after "X" amount of time. You're right, there's no point in leaving an ad on the forum if it's 2 years old. I'd think you should be able to view ads that are 90 and newer.

Anything older should automatically go into the archive which could still be accessible but you'd have to physically look there.

Mark

 

it's funny, cuz I DID write a guy with a nearly two year old ad and the car WAS STILL AVAILABLE. It had been so long that he forgot about it. He even said that noone had called about the car in a long time (probably most people were like you and assumed wrong). Granted, his situation was kinda sketchy and he ultimately decided to keep the car when I asked him for service records that he did not have, but the fact remains: if items posted for sale don't automatically expire after a certain time, it becomes a waste of time for everyone by keeping that info on NAM.

As for sellers who "don't care to respond", those people should stay off this site. If buyers are inquiring, you should be able to write a simple message back saying it's sold or it should minimally remind you to take off the ad. By not responding is like deliberately being a jerk to someone else in the community. Is that the NAM that I'm supposed to get used to?

 

I am a Miata.net member also and our adds over there expire and have to be renewed after 30 days. If you don't renew, they disapear. May that could happen here also. This keeps the lists relitively short. I have yet to buy anything, but have already found it anoying to look at sold items ar items that have been up for a year.

 

to the moderators:

when you say you're working on it, what kind of timeline are we talking about? being that ads are as old as 2 years, I'm assuming that this is a 2 year old problem?

at what point should we be upset and bring this to your attention again?

like others have said on this thread, enthusiast sites from other makers (including BMW) have this very simple dynamic already implemented on their websites. Even Craigslist does too. I would like to think that the NAM site is a bit more comprehensive than CL, so why are we lagging so far behind?
so much so that we have Mark (orangecrush) actually encouraging new users like myself to get used to seeing dead ads, non responsive sellers, and more deadbeat sellers. that's not a marketplace; it's a graveyard.
no thanks.

If that's the case, i'll just stick to the original plan and use this site strictly to get, not give, my MINI 411.

response would be appreciated.

 

The marketplace is a relatively new system that's only a couple years old. It was placed to help users organize the way they sell and buy their parts. Because this marketplace only a couple years old, this is our first experiencing this problem with 2 year old ads. Thus, the moderators are taking extra precaution to create a satisfying result.

We are seeing if there are other ways to resolve old ads that are not marked sold, such as auto purging or even going as far as PMing those sellers to see if they wish to keep their ads up. But we also have other ideas in discussion. We're may also redefine our guidelines so we can satisfy all parties as some users would prefer these items to stay listed so they can use it as a guideline to judge the price of the parts their selling or buying.

I don't understand what's upsetting you. Would you like to go into detail? If you are referring to "it's very frustrating and annoying seeing product you want, but noone is answering the call on the other end." Then I would like to apologize to you for not getting the product/response you wanted. But I would like to advice to use self discretion as the chances of a response from a two year old ad is obviously slim. Having high hopes in a response for a 2 year old ad may not be the best idea. At the same time I understand a 2 year old ad that is not marked as 'sold' should technically still be live in a live market, therefore I understand a bit of your frustration. Again the moderators are discussing a proper solution for ads like this as the user may have simply forgotten to mark it as sold, or perhaps the item is really still in the market.


Craigslist ads expire over time and are deleted. There is no way of using Craigslist as a research tool to judge the price of a similar part someone wishes to sell. NAM's market place is a great tool for users to estimate prices for parts. It's a apples and oranges comparison. I haven't seen Orangecrush specifically encourage anyone to get use to seeing non active ads.

Again, we are aware of your responses and concerns and we're working on it. Thanks for your patience.

 

Alot of the sellers are no post or very few post members who only signed up to sell. I've found they are the most difficult to reach but I sure won't lose any sleep over not getting a response.

 

I can understand a desire to clean older sales up. However, there are also members who would like them to stay for reference. There's a choice to be made there, and once things are deleted there's no going back. It needs to be the right decision before ads are removed.

As far as getting upset at moderation about deadbeat sellers who don't respond, I'm not really sure what you'd like to see happen there. It's not like we can exactly strong-arm someone to their keyboard and force them to reply to you.

And I'm not sure what good getting upset about an online marketplace in general is going to do...but that's probably an entirely different subject

Believe me, it's being discussed - just because you can't see the conversation doesn't mean it isn't happening.

 

Largely agreed, there's no harm in making sellers respond if they want to make the sale. There has been a marketplace on NAM for many years, go deep to an old thread find something you like make an offer and the same risk was there, the dates are attached to each ad, the older you go, the more likely you are to find someone that came in and tried to offload some spare items before trading the car in.

This wasn't viewed as a "problem" until this thread came about. There's years of archived marketplace items here (https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...ce-archive-15/) too, that remain availible for peoples records and determining a good going rate for items.

NAM is not craigslist or eBay, we're much more community oriented here, and so I don't think those layouts are accurate comparisons. As was stated, once items are deleted it is a permenant action; so while we are considering removing ads of a certain age and what that age may or may not be, we're also looking at options for better organizing the information.

But bottom line is you can't sell an item if you don't respond, and odds are someone else is offering the same item with the exception of a few rare parts.

 

I agree, it's never been a problem until now.

Having said that... I have a suggestion.

Perhaps it would be useful to make ads expire after a certain amount of time.

Even if it were 6 months (which seems long to me) at least it would cure several problems...

1) it would allow sellers ample time to sell a product

2) it would allow people to still use older ads for reference pricing. (anything more than 6 months old would probably not be a fair comparison to todays items being sold anyways)

3) It would eliminate the marketplace from useless clutter.

Just a suggestion...

Mark

 

On the Internet, a couple of years doesn't count as "relatively new". It's not like the old system had been around all that long either.

However, I understand that if you ask Internet Brands to make the change, it won't happen anytime soon if at all, even if it would take a programmer only a few hours to implement.

 

Internet Brands doesn't make any forum changes - they are all done by NAM admin staff.

 

geez-us. noone here is upset. i am merely trying to encourage responsible and courteous responses from an active MINI community. is that really so bad?

i agree that SOLD items should be kept for reference for current sellers, but do you really have to feature these sold items (down the right side of the page) as if they're still available?

lastly, my question of how long we should wait for your implemented changes before getting upset was merely to gauge how fast things move around here (I'm only a member for less than 1.5 months), so please don't twist my words around as if i'm making demands or having a hissy fit. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter to me. Like you said, MLPearson, it's just a marketplace, so no need to get upset over it.