A Commerce Section?

[Samurai Equine 58,587]

How about a commerce section? It might be nice to have a place where bronies and pegasisters can buy, trade, share, and sell their pony merch.

 

People who want to buy imported merchandise and users offering middleman services could meet in this section.

 

Everyone could also share pictures of their collections and newly acquired swag.

[Quilava 1,290]

As a first stated point, there already resides a place here on MLP Forums where users are able to not only share their merchandise, but generally discuss every aspect of it. The sub lies within the Sugarcube Corner, and is aptly named Pony Merchandise!

 

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However, in regards to the main point of this suggestion there is a massive concern and issue for this sort of thing: Scamming. There is simply just no way to monitor any of the transactions and arrangements that could go on within these types of threads. Not only could this result in users here becoming infuriated that they paid for an item and it wasn't shipped, the opposite with them sending an item and never receiving payment, or when a trade goes through and only one end keeps their word. 

 

Normally, the user would then go to the people who are hosting the grounds for the trade, the admins (even more-so Feld0 since he hosts the forum) and complain to them in hopes that something get done. Sure, a way around this would be to use current staff, or even add additional staff (hehe) to act as honorary middlemen to ensure honesty and such is kept between users, but then there lies adding more staff that we could trust, trust, taking a lot of time to found and build properly and securely. 

 

In my general opinion, having a market area would be a very instable and insecure idea coming from where we stand as a site.

[Guest90210 3,569]

As Lugi mentioned, in theory it would be a nice section, but the risk of theft is too great to consider the idea. It would create an unnecessary increase in workload for the staff

[Samurai Equine 58,587]

I appreciate and understand where you're coming from with this, but if it's a matter of additional monitoring or administration, I think there must be a way to make to make it happen. I have come from other fandom message boards (Tokusatsu, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc) that also had a commerce section or allowed users to buy and sell items amongst each other. In all that time, there were 1 or 2 scammers, but the community was so big, we were able to lock it down and reveal the con artists really fast. I don't know the full process, but I know part of it was being alert, making sure the pics of the merch being sold was not ripped from some other location, etc. And I strongly believe this fandom is big enough to spot a scammer before it gets out of hand.

 

However, if you're firm on this decision, I completely respect it. Thank you for entertaining my suggestion.

[Jeric 46,894]

Huh? I actually like the angle Luigi took on this. It wasn't focused as much on staff resources, legal liability, or technical limitations. The response was about the board wanting to protect the integrity of the member experience first and foremost.

 

And there is another problem. What is the liability if the board facilitating a verbal contract between adults ant non-adults?