Decision on Make It Mine, and more advice sought

We’ve read your responses. If you go through them yourselves, you will see that there is no one answer that meets the needs of everyone (including us). But we do think there is a solution with which most appear to be comfortable. That is, we are going to lower the ratio by which Make It Mine must exceed the starting price from what we proposed (2X) to 1.5X, and not offer exceptions. This code will roll Thursday afternoon, December 7. There are a few folks who have made reasonable arguments that this still may not work for them. To them I have two responses:

1) We will watch and see how this settles out. If it is the case that for higher-priced items this will not work, then we will develop code that lets us adopt a policy of having a lower multiplier for higher-priced goods.

2) For those who say they need to continue the “$9.99 starting price, $10.00 MIM” system, I repeat that this is not an auction, it is a classified ad. It is not that I object to classified ads, I just object to classified ads pretending to be auctions. So what we are now kicking around is the possibility of you being able to list MIM’s with no auction component: in short, an explicit classified ad. However, I am not sure I am comfortable with subscription plans for these. Again, we seek your advice.

In addition, we know that some were disappointed when we took down our one-day auctions. Our decision to do that was driven by the fact that over time we suspected a higher incidence of fraud was associated with those auctions (generally on weekends). We are considering re-opening the site for one-day auctions, but within some parameters such as weekdays-only, or only for sellers with adequate histories and ratings.

Well, we know these decisions affect all of you, and regret that some will be disappointed, but we do hope that by dropping the multiplier from 2 to 1.5 but eliminating exceptions you folks feel that, on balance, we have resolved this fairly, and that you will feel comfortable sharing your comments regarding these other issues (classified listings, and one-day auctions).

Best of luck with all your auctions.

Your humble servants,
Patrick, Stormy, and Meghan