So to reiterate and get some clarifications, future state of costs to BHW to sell services are:
In return, we will have the fantastic new ability to have this same entity essentially controlling where money goes, on a BLACK HAT forum, that has had user information leaked publicly in the past, has been the subject of FBI investigations, and sells shady services like cracked Spotify accounts, game hack spam, and document forgery?
- Jr. VIP, which will be increasing 50% annually
- Sales thread cost
- The BUYER pays an additional 20-30% on top of the service cost, which is pocketed by BHW
- Whatever the cost of escrow would be
I'll be 100% honest, I use this site mainly to interact with others that are in the same field I am, and to provide writing services occasionally. I have also bought tens of thousands of dollars in services from BHW members via the site, and have reviewed thousands of dollars on top of that.
This would be a double kiss of death for me. Fourfold cost increases that affect both buyers and sellers, on top of the current issues that have been going on, I don't see how a massive drop in engagement and quality is not on the horizon. Fix your current issues (blatant fake review spam, site downtime, nightly spam threads where fixes have been proposed and ignored, attrition of high-value members leaving the forum, etc), THEN talk about shiny new objects.
Jr. VIP, which will be increasing 50% annually - every year ???
From my perspective, I'd like it to be mandatory that all sellers on here have 2step authentication in place.
Sorry @proxygo
I think I mis-stated that as an annual increase vs the annual price increasing. Regardless, I believe
that the grandfathering in is based on PayPal's subscription basis, meaning that you would have
to ensure that your pricing is set at the $97+20% as yours is manual (when that time comes).
If I was a seller I'd be pissed, 30% higher prices to customers and they have to trust you to handle payments... Paypal/stripe and 2CO are about 4% and they are a global companies with stiff financial regulation. What are BHW offering for the other 26% percent? I suppose it's optional but just looks like greed. Not to mention are you going to pay out daily like these platforms offer? Or hold their money and pay out monthly.
As a buyer I am just left confused. You have marketplace rules that you don't enforce now and some of the mods doing reviews don't seem to know what they are doing (see my last thread) so for the extra 30% are you actually going to follow your own rules and hire mods who know how to review products?
I'm not sure this is the solution to applying your own forum rules to your current marketplace. I kind of like that we deal with service providers directly.
I'm curious if you centralizing the marketplace will mean the end to some "less than whitehat" services such as buying fake/photoshopped ID documents from @secondeye (and others) or buying VCC's from various other sellers. We also have services that help get adobe licenses/spotify/microsoft accounts for cheap. Facebook/instagram also come down hard on those caught selling likes, does this mean your new platform won't allow these kind of things as I imagine they are a liability? If they go wrong what happens to everyone else on this new centralized payment system?
So to reiterate and get some clarifications, future state of costs to BHW to sell services are:
In return, we will have the fantastic new ability to have this same entity essentially controlling where money goes, on a BLACK HAT forum, that has had user information leaked publicly in the past, has been the subject of FBI investigations, and sells shady services like cracked Spotify accounts, game hack spam, and document forgery?
- Jr. VIP, which will be increasing 50% annually
- Sales thread cost
- The BUYER pays an additional 20-30% on top of the service cost, which is pocketed by BHW
- Whatever the cost of escrow would be
I'll be 100% honest, I use this site mainly to interact with others that are in the same field I am, and to provide writing services occasionally. I have also bought tens of thousands of dollars in services from BHW members via the site, and have reviewed thousands of dollars on top of that.
This would be a double kiss of death for me. Fourfold cost increases that affect both buyers and sellers, on top of the current issues that have been going on, I don't see how a massive drop in engagement and quality is not on the horizon. Fix your current issues (blatant fake review spam, site downtime, nightly spam threads where fixes have been proposed and ignored, attrition of high-value members leaving the forum, etc), THEN talk about shiny new objects.