It's been two weeks since the launch of Marketplace and in that time we've received lots of great feedback in the Marketplace Forum as well as via various online bulletin boards. Earlier this week we held a multi-hour planning meeting to discuss software enhancements to respond to the feedback. The result of this meeting was development of a "product road map" to take us through the next 4-6 weeks.
Here is an excerpt from Steve Bachmann's more detailed Marketplace Forum post on this topic.
1. "Bidder education" (Timing: Within next 1-2 weeks)
A number of bids have been placed which are unrealistically low. While we are not going to impose a required minimum bid, we want to ensure bidders are consciously entering a bid price that reflects objective market pricing data
Step 1 of the bidding wizard will be revised to include market data pricing points (when available) and we will implement helpful rules-based messaging on pricing and quantity values entered during this step.
2. "Open to buy" (Timing: Within next 1-2 weeks)The initial design of Marketplace assumes that each bid would only ever be fulfilled by a single seller. Therefore, if the seller doesn't have the required quantity (in a single location) to supply the full quantity in the bid, the seller is not able to accept the bid.
In the future we will be adopting more of an "open to buy" approach where the bid quantity is really a maximum only and not also the minimum. For example, if the bidder wants to purchase 60 bottles of a given wine for a particular price, we will notify any and all sellers (even those with 1-2 bottles) and permit them to accept bids for lesser quantities. This "open to buy" method will become the default approach soon (with an option of invoking the single supplier method).
3. Auto-accept rule from Vinfolio storage (Timing: Mid-to-late August)
In general, bidders have expressed the desire for more responsiveness from sellers and advance knowledge of whether an asking price is "firm". Moreover, with or without an asking price, we know many trade sellers (and others) wish to "automate" the process of accepting a bid (to reduce labor costs to administer their participation) and also to gain an edge in accepting bids versus competing sellers. We call this generic capability "Auto-accept."
The first (and easiest) step for us to take in enabling this capability is to implement it for wine being sold from Vinfolio storage. After that phase is implemented, we will expand the concept's application.
4. Wine Watcher(TM) alerts (Timing: Mid-to-late August)
Marketplace users have asked for tools which support more, timely interaction. While we already have bid alerts to notify sellers when a new bid is made on wine that is marked for sale, we do not currently have a means of notifying bidders (or just "watchers") of various forms of activity relating to a specific wine. Therefore, we've decided to implement a capability we're naming Wine Watcher alerts.
Any Vinfolio user will be able to configure Wine Watcher alerts to monitor one or more pre-defined activities on a daily or immediate notification basis. A Wine Watcher "Active Bids" alert will be automatically created for bidders and be comprised of the list of wines with active bids. By default, the Active Bids alert will be configured to deliver an immediate notification whenever a new low asking price is entered by a seller or a new bid is placed by someone else on the same wine.
5. "Quantity caps" (Timing: Mid-to-late August)
To avoid having large quantities of individual items available that may distort the intended business positioning of the Marketplace and skew sorting/filtering by quantity, we will implement a maximum displayed quantity per item of 120 bottles for all users.
6. Detailed retail market pricing pop-up (Timing: Mid-to-late August)
We currently provide various market pricing data to both buyers and sellers based on the belief that market price transparency encourages convergence between buyers on sellers on a "fair market value price" needed to complete a Marketplace transaction. In addition to the following data currently available on wine detail pages, this project will integrate individual retail price istings:
- Marketplace transaction history (very limited now but will grow over time)
- Major auction house results from WinePrices.com (both averages and details of individual lots sold)
- U.S. retail average pricing
- Active bid prices
7. Bidder-requested deferred inbound shipping (Timing: Fall 2009)
We already take steps to ensure sellers' wine is protected during its inbound shipment by increasing shipping speeds during periods of adverse weather. However, some buyers and sellers would prefer to eliminate all risk (including unforeseen events that could create delays). This project will enable bidders to specify that their bid should only be accepted by a seller whose wine will be sent either after a certain date or when the weather check which Vinfolio performs between the originating Zip code and our warehouse's Zip code satisfies the requested conditions. As this project could not be implemented in time for the summer months, we have deferred it until the Fall.
Other ideas
If you have other suggestions not addressed by the above plans, please add a comment to this blog or create a new topic in the Marketplace Forum.
