No translation exists for 'SHOW_BLOG'! [ERROR 230] blog by Colin R. Turner, September 16th, 2021. 461
No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. We did just add a price field into our listing form, but don’t worry, we’re not selling out!
You may have noticed a surprising new addition to the Add Offer form – a Dollar Value field! But don’t be alarmed, this is a private field that we are using to track the value of our inventory and transactions. Your value estimate is never displayed on your listing and we aren’t selling anything!
One of the greatest challenges of promoting a site like Sharebay is getting enough users to use the platform so that it becomes truly useful. For example, if there is only one person in your area sharing items, chances are very small that you are going to regularly find things that interest you. Whereas, if there were a hundred people, the chances of finding good things would be considerably higher.
I call this the ‘Threshold of Usefulness’. Needless to say, we’re not there yet in most areas, so we’ve a lot to do to convince people to come on board when there aren’t that many offers to entice them.
So we’ve got to use every tool at our disposal to entice new members. One of them – as you’ve no doubt noticed – is enumerating the items in our inventory to show how many items and skills we currently have available. Another one is to put an estimated monetary value on the inventory. Much as we love to see people sharing, a monetary value really helps us to express the value of our members’ goods and services in a way that people can instantly relate to.
We’ve started off by setting an average Dollar value on each item and service of $25. On checking through 50 random listings, $25 seemed to come in as the average overall. As of writing, this has given our total inventory a Dollar value of over $260,000!
Another cool feature of this approach is that we can provide a rough estimate of how much people are saving in the transactions. So far (as of writing), we have saved people over $13,000! That's not bad for beginners, eh?
Needless to say, if you believe the value of your items and services are under- or over-valued, please change them right away just by editing any of your listings. (The new Dollar Value field is just below the Tag field) And if for any reason you don’t want to set a value in future posts, that’s perfectly fine too. You can just leave it blank and it will count as zero value.
Anyway I hope you can appreciate the difference this will make to those of us working on the promotion end. And remember, the value you set is never made public and doesn''t affect your listing visibility in any way
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