Hey Andrew, I have a suggestion for you. How about first getting rid of the words 'trusted' and 'vendor' first. I would implement something like the 'eBay' system. For example, anyone who lists at least 1 item in the Market can be a 'Seller' (paid or free). If that 'seller' reaches a specific goal such as 10+ products and/or 25+ sales, they would automatically advance to a 'Top Seller'. That way you leave out any words that refer to BoonEx 'trusting', 'approving', or 'recommending' the seller. A see more 'Top Seller' would ONLY mean they 'fit the criteria'. Update the rating system for products. Right now its just 'stars'. You should include words like 'Poor, Fair, Good, Excellent' with the rating depending on the 'stars' (ex. 0-1 star = poor, 5 = Excellent).
Then, If the person is a seller, have an 'badge' of some sort (one for seller, one for top seller) and have that displayed on their BoonEx profile WITH and average of ALL ratings combined from all their products. So for example, if BonnEx123 is a 'Top Seller' who has 15 products in the Market that have 12 Excellent and 3 Good ratings , on their profile page would be a 'Top Seller' icon and right beside it would be the word 'Excellent' with 5 stars. It make take some work to do this, but I believe in the end, it would work the best for everyone. This will also get more people to rate/review products also.
I forgot to mention that if the seller removes their items from the market or falls below the criteria for 'Top Seller' they should automatically be removed as a 'seller' or demoted from 'top seller' to just 'seller'. So some obviously database queries will be needed :)
Zarcon, you are right on the money! Andrew, to list a vendor as Trusted or Preferred is a legal liability that Boonex is putting themselves in by recommending a product and quantifying their work as quality. This should only be done by both things that Zarcon has identified. THere should be a ranking of # of sales/products sold (easy fix of 10 minutes) by showing the number of sales transactions a vendor has overall as well as by category. List them as a Power Seller... or whatever moniker you desire. see more Then when a person peruses templates category, the sellers with the highest volume appear at top, or have icons easily identifying them.
As far as the Trusted status..... that should be only based upon the overall ratings of CONFIRMED purchases. Let the community police itself, and if a person doesn't do their job, then the subsequent rating will drop them out automatically if they fall below an 80% approval... or 4 of 5 stars on product ratings. Add a Ratings link to the Cart History, and be done with this situation.
Thanks richmanfl! I figure if that type of rating system works for a huge giant like eBay, it would be a great 'template' that BoonEx could do as well. Having a system like this where you have visible/detailed rankings and levels like Seller, Top Seller, Power Seller (like you mentioned) would be a very direct way of letting customers know about these sellers/products.
It's not enough to have x number of products and/or x number of sales. What if a person has 10 mediocre modules that over a long period of time eventually combine to meet the minimum number of sales to be a 'Top Seller'? Would you be okay with calling them a 'Top Seller'... I wouldn't. The revised system should only track the last 12 (18?) months of sales so modules that decline in popularity will eventually be reflected in the seller's current rating. Now we don't want sellers to remove older see more modules (since not everyone upgrades) once they begin to lower their seller rating so the system could allow a way to clearly tag older modules that are no longer popular... and by doing so the "Top Seller" rating system would ignore them when doing calculations. Another issue... the system should take into account the number of sales relative to the number of modules being sold... so a new seller with a couple of very good modules can compete with an established seller with a multitude of modules... not all "very good". One possibility is for each product to be considered on it's own... thus a seller with many "very popular" modules would be recognized many times... while a seller with only one "very popular" module would only be recognized once. The underlying idea is to make as many of the calculations as subjective as possible by using "hard" facts, i.e. number of modules, number of sales, and date of sales. We could also take into account the date of the last update to the code but that's too easy to manipulate by the vendors.
As I stated in my post, the number of products available would determine the label of Seller, Top Seller, Power Seller or whatever they want to call it. The key is the average ratings of products or what could be referred to as 'reputation'. So in your example, if you had a person who sold 15 products, but only sold 1 of each, and each review rating was excellent, would they be a Top Seller? Of course they would. 1 - they fit the criteria of modules in the Market, 2 - the average rating was excellent. see more Now, if they person received all 'poor' reviews, would they still be a top seller? Yes, because that 'label' only comes from meeting the criteria of items in the Market. Unfortunately, that 'Top Seller' would have a 'Poor' average rating though. The issue with your suggestion is this, there are only 2 things you can calculate here, number of products and review ratings. Again this may be a verbiage thing, so maybe using something like 'Basic Seller', 'Advanced Seller', 'Premium Seller' may be better. Using the date may not be sufficient since some sellers have had their modules out there for quite some time but just keep updating it. This should be based on ALL modules regardless of when it was added.
Then we disagree on what a "Top Seller" is and how it should be calculated. Under your scheme, a vendor could put up 10 crappy modules and "sell" one of each to his buddy (or an alias) who then upon giving them all a 5-star review will make him a "Top Seller". Not everyone reviews vendors so the data collected is a sampling at best and could easily be skewed. By using hard data, such as number of sales in the last 12 months, the system should be more accurate. As see more for your assertion that I would exclude modules that were created some time ago, you have misunderstood. I'm well aware that some very good modules have been kept (or been designed to be) in very good working condition and are very popular... so should be included in calculations. My suggestion was to allow vendors with older modules that get few sales to have the option to keep them listed but tagged as "older" (or some appropriate wording) so they can be ignored in calculations *IF* such calculations are based on a group of modules and their combined sales. Maybe what is need is both a rating system based solely on hard facts and a separate one based on buyer feedback. However, I would suggest anything based on buyer feedback require a healthy minimum of input before any kind of assertion is concluded from the feedback... thus eliminating the possibility that a single 5-star review for a product could allow it to be translated into label of "Top Seller". Plus the age of the review should be taking into account since I have found cases where vendors started out, some years ago, getting great reviews then appear to have stopped offering "great" support... resulting in a growing number of slowly (if at all) answered requests for help. Only recent reviews (last 12 months?) should be considered... that's what I'm interested in knowing, i.e. is this vendor currently active in properly supporting his modules?
I totally understand your point and do not disagree with calculating in the number of sales somehow. We can go back and forth all day long probably, but in order for this to work buyers NEED TO POST REVIEWS (good or bad). I can't tell you how many market items that I know for a fact have been sold, but yet do not have a single review on them. So until people start posting reviews, none of this will work properly.
One of the suggestions i made a while back on that was to do something like netflix does after you have watched a movie.
A few days after someone makes a purchase, the site should present a section at the top of the page showing the module they purchased and ask them to review it. I believe that will increase the number of reviews, and the more reviews there are, the more accurate any automated system will be.
A few days after someone makes a purchase, the site should present a section at the top of the page showing the module they purchased and ask them to review it. I believe that will increase the number of reviews, and the more reviews there are, the more accurate any automated system will be.