the "for sales" philosophy

When we set a no sales policy, I believe that it was the right choice for the time and I'm really grateful to Joe and the other mods for enforcing it to the best of their abilities.

I think the reasons for having this policy are less sound today. The downside of not encouraging active trade amongst collectors and the resultant "collection stagnation" probably does more harm than any number of fly-by-night cel dealers ever could.

I would like to see the market area expand greatly with sales capability open to anyone in good standing. Also, I've decided (somewhat unilaterally, apologies to mods) that we should have a "for offer" flag that you can set which puts all of your items in your gallery on offer automagically. This will probably come some time in the future and not on this first pass.

This is just an idea for now. I wanted to get people to start talking about the pros and cons. What do you think, beta testers? I'll probably open this up to the larger community soon but wanted to ask you first.

I really like the idea of a "for offer" tag!

I understood the reasoning behind "no sales" to keep dealers out, but it does mean that collectors have to do a lot of roundabout ways to trade or sell. I agree that is a hard problem to solve.

It would also be nice if users could link their cels to the corresponding listings in the shop.

It wouldn't be a "link to the shop". It would be more of a "enable sales on this item" type of thing. Rubberslug will then happily use all of your already-entered info about an item and turn it into a shop item. Remove from the shop at any time.

Furthermore, you'd be able to, say, flag your entire gallery as being "up for sale/offers". We could easily build on top of that such as adding "NFS" flags to you favorite items or flag, say, only certain gallery sections for sale.

The trade off here would be that Rubberslug asks for some small percentage (lower than ebay) of any successful sale after a certain "free sales" peak is reached. I know, it's always been free before, but I think everyone can agree that it's fair that the site get a small percentage of a collector making money from it.

That's the one tiny downside. The huge upside is far easier sales management (one-click sales, essentially), free sales up to a certain limit, sponsorship perks tied to waiving of sales fees, and more cels in the open market.

Cel collecting needs high volume in the open market. Without liquidity, any economy goes into the toilet. That's really the primary motivation here. The token pocket change that we'll ask for is just to keep people serious.

can i just say yay as i hste ebay sakes and would rather give my cash here

I'm kind of glad to hear that RS is now considering overturning its no sales policy. I don't mind paying a small fee, however I think it shouldn't be based off a percentage of a sale. Rather it should be a static tiered pricing after reaching a free number of sales in a month (or a year?).

Also how will RS deal with trades? What if it is a trade with cash? In my experience I have had a lot of trading transactions and I view them as much as part of the hobby.

As for the for offers my only concern would be that some of the galleries will start looking like a sales website. But I guess that's really up to the gallery owner if they want their galleries to look like a for sale page.