Sunday, November 09, 2003
This is what I wrote about my site some months ago for a reporter who was interested in the general topic of trading on the Internet.
The founding idea for my web site (http://www.tradecardsonline.com) came about when I started playing collectible card games myself. I found that as part of this hobby I had to trade cards, and I realized that the circle of people I had access to from my local shop was quite limited.
As I'm a computer analyst and web programmer, I immediately turned to the Internet as a way to contact other card traders. But what I found was that the only available contact methods were the specialized forums were people would post messages about the cards they wanted and needed. I found it tedious to read over all those messages looking for a coincidence with the cards I needed and had for trade.
So the IT specialist in me started to think about how it would be quite feasible to automate this process and use a computer system that would look for these matches and notify me when it found any. That's how the idea for Trade Cards Online came about. It would be a trading hub where users would need to enter their collections only once and the system would compare the wants and haves of all the subscribers and report on any possible trades. It even would do this automatically every day, so you would be notified about new additions to other people's collections that fitted with what you were looking for. This way the system would free traders from the need of visiting multiple forums on the net, manually searching for messages that could interest them.
The second need I identified in my research and as part of my activity as a trader myself, was that of some kind of guarantee when trading over postal mail with people you didn't really know. I was aware, by reading comments from annoyed traders that had been cheated, and from the existence of 'bad traders' lists (like Good Traders Against Bad Traders: (http://www.gabtraders.com) that not everyone was honest, as would be expected. The only way to prevent one party in a trade from not satisfying their agreement, was to place a trustful intermediary in the process which would make sure both traders would send their cards before delivering them to their final owners. In fact, I found a web site that did exactly this (http://www.safecards.com), but they since have discontinued their activity. So I thought this role as a referee in trades was a perfect complement for my trading hub web site. People would be able to find trades on my site, and then use it also as a trustful intermediary to protect the actual exchange of cards.
We are not getting a high demand of this Protected Trade service right now, and we guess this is due to the associated costs. We only have offices in Spain, so people have to pay for international postage to and from our offices, even if they intend to trade with someone in their own country. Even though our processing fees are really low, most people find the service worthwhile only when trading cards of high value. Nevertheless, we've made this service available just a couple of months ago so we can't estimate yet how popular it may become.
In fact, we find that there is still a good level of dishonest activity that hurts online traders. We spend some proportion of our time fighting against it, and receive periodically reports about bad traders from users of our site. We investigate each report, and contact the alleged offending user requesting for clarification. If no satisfactory reply is provided, we take the necessary measures to protect the honest traders in our site, like discontinuing the offending traders accounts with us, and even sending their e-mail addresses to the victims so that they can report their cases to 'bad traders' lists like GAB. In fact, this is the only case in which we may reveal our users' e-mail addresses to third parties. Save for this, the privacy of our membership base is guaranteed and protected by our system (no user knows the e-mail address of any other user unless they give it to each other explicitly).
In this regard, we find that the work done by GAB is necessary and needs to be used by any online trader as a first measure to protect themselves. The helpful fellows at GAB investigate each report they get, a bit like we do, but they maintain a well documented list of suspect bad traders. If a user is not listed at GAB there is no guarantee he is a trustful trader, but if he is found there, then it is obviously wise to stay away from him.
Regarding the trend on Internet trading, I can not give you well-documented statistics, but in the couple of years I have been in this business I think it is safe to say that it is certainly not diminishing. Specially in the collectible cards arena, where the fan base keeps growing I think it will get more and more important with time. And as the traffic increases, obviously more cheaters would get attracted to this activity looking for easy profit. As an example, the recent great success of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, which is aimed at the younger players, makes it more important to have tools in place to protect trades over the Internet, so that parents can rest assured their kids don't get ripped off by dishonest strangers. For that reason alone, I think it is important we keep our Protected Trades service available, even if it is not profitable for us by itself.
Summarizing it all, I think Trade Cards Online have filled in a real need in the card trading community, helping them to find each other and arrange good trades. This gets reflected in the feedback we get, which is almost always positive. Even when our users request an improvement, they usually start by commenting on how much they enjoy our services. In fact, we do encourage our users to send us their comments and suggestions, and we listen to them and work continuously on improving our site. I think this is in good part the key to our success.
The founding idea for my web site (http://www.tradecardsonline.com) came about when I started playing collectible card games myself. I found that as part of this hobby I had to trade cards, and I realized that the circle of people I had access to from my local shop was quite limited.
As I'm a computer analyst and web programmer, I immediately turned to the Internet as a way to contact other card traders. But what I found was that the only available contact methods were the specialized forums were people would post messages about the cards they wanted and needed. I found it tedious to read over all those messages looking for a coincidence with the cards I needed and had for trade.
So the IT specialist in me started to think about how it would be quite feasible to automate this process and use a computer system that would look for these matches and notify me when it found any. That's how the idea for Trade Cards Online came about. It would be a trading hub where users would need to enter their collections only once and the system would compare the wants and haves of all the subscribers and report on any possible trades. It even would do this automatically every day, so you would be notified about new additions to other people's collections that fitted with what you were looking for. This way the system would free traders from the need of visiting multiple forums on the net, manually searching for messages that could interest them.
The second need I identified in my research and as part of my activity as a trader myself, was that of some kind of guarantee when trading over postal mail with people you didn't really know. I was aware, by reading comments from annoyed traders that had been cheated, and from the existence of 'bad traders' lists (like Good Traders Against Bad Traders: (http://www.gabtraders.com) that not everyone was honest, as would be expected. The only way to prevent one party in a trade from not satisfying their agreement, was to place a trustful intermediary in the process which would make sure both traders would send their cards before delivering them to their final owners. In fact, I found a web site that did exactly this (http://www.safecards.com), but they since have discontinued their activity. So I thought this role as a referee in trades was a perfect complement for my trading hub web site. People would be able to find trades on my site, and then use it also as a trustful intermediary to protect the actual exchange of cards.
We are not getting a high demand of this Protected Trade service right now, and we guess this is due to the associated costs. We only have offices in Spain, so people have to pay for international postage to and from our offices, even if they intend to trade with someone in their own country. Even though our processing fees are really low, most people find the service worthwhile only when trading cards of high value. Nevertheless, we've made this service available just a couple of months ago so we can't estimate yet how popular it may become.
In fact, we find that there is still a good level of dishonest activity that hurts online traders. We spend some proportion of our time fighting against it, and receive periodically reports about bad traders from users of our site. We investigate each report, and contact the alleged offending user requesting for clarification. If no satisfactory reply is provided, we take the necessary measures to protect the honest traders in our site, like discontinuing the offending traders accounts with us, and even sending their e-mail addresses to the victims so that they can report their cases to 'bad traders' lists like GAB. In fact, this is the only case in which we may reveal our users' e-mail addresses to third parties. Save for this, the privacy of our membership base is guaranteed and protected by our system (no user knows the e-mail address of any other user unless they give it to each other explicitly).
In this regard, we find that the work done by GAB is necessary and needs to be used by any online trader as a first measure to protect themselves. The helpful fellows at GAB investigate each report they get, a bit like we do, but they maintain a well documented list of suspect bad traders. If a user is not listed at GAB there is no guarantee he is a trustful trader, but if he is found there, then it is obviously wise to stay away from him.
Regarding the trend on Internet trading, I can not give you well-documented statistics, but in the couple of years I have been in this business I think it is safe to say that it is certainly not diminishing. Specially in the collectible cards arena, where the fan base keeps growing I think it will get more and more important with time. And as the traffic increases, obviously more cheaters would get attracted to this activity looking for easy profit. As an example, the recent great success of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, which is aimed at the younger players, makes it more important to have tools in place to protect trades over the Internet, so that parents can rest assured their kids don't get ripped off by dishonest strangers. For that reason alone, I think it is important we keep our Protected Trades service available, even if it is not profitable for us by itself.
Summarizing it all, I think Trade Cards Online have filled in a real need in the card trading community, helping them to find each other and arrange good trades. This gets reflected in the feedback we get, which is almost always positive. Even when our users request an improvement, they usually start by commenting on how much they enjoy our services. In fact, we do encourage our users to send us their comments and suggestions, and we listen to them and work continuously on improving our site. I think this is in good part the key to our success.
