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Account Limits & Recovery
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By 🥷🏻 @ColorfulRod45, 11/13/2023 4:12 pm
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Good Afternoon Everyone Selling on AT!
TL;DR:
If you received the warning medal and can’t list anymore: Please navigate to https://appointmenttrader.com/modules/community/team.php?allmedals and tap on the magnifying glass icon next to the recovery medal to request it, so you can list and payout again while reducing your refund rate, in exchange for an additional 10% penalty fee while holding the refund medal.
If you have a refund rate of under 7% please type on my wall (@ColorfulRod45) so I can hook you up with the City Area Administrator Medal which will allow you to sponsor people who have a high refund rate and put them on the right path.
You get two new sponsorships for every one sponsoree you lead back to under 10% refund rate.
Roughly 5% go to the sponsor and 5% go to AT to cover all the chargeback fees the many refunds have triggered.
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As many of you have noticed and shared in the community and chats, we released a large update this weekend.
Some sellers are very happy about this update and others are not – the one’s that are happy about it are the sellers who have a low refund rate and high sales volume – the reason for them being happy, is that they now sell more because their listings get ranked higher, can pay out thousands of dollars per day, pay less interest have higher credit limits and last and absolutely not least can _self-review_ listings (which also works in the API) and dramatically increases turn around time, especially when filling bids.
The sellers that were less happy are sellers with a refund rate in excess of 10% across the past 200 sales they made, as those sellers have received a penalty medal which restricts their ability to upload new listings and reduces their importance points which ranks their listings lower on the sales page than the sellers who have a better track record.
Since the release, the most common sentence from the latter group I have read is that ‘it is not fair to sellers’. I truly believe these sellers are unfair to customers and to their fellow sellers as it discredits AppointmentTrader as a whole.
There is a reason why I am typing this message in the tone I selected.
Imagine you are hungry –
A hard day of filling bids has passed and you are popping open uber eats, to get a nice pasta.
You get a confirmation message, open up your favorite movie and are really excited for that spaghetti to hit your couch in a few minutes and you to share the relaxation you invite a friend over to have the delicious pasta with them.
20 minutes in, everything looks great, the order is still placed and your friend arrives –
but then: the driver just cancels on you, and every other desirable pasta place is closed.
You sit there hungry, hungry and sad with your sad friend.
Well – I guess it can happen. But then you use uber eats again, and like clockwork every fourth or fifth time the same thing happens.
How many people do you think would continue to use this service?
If you translate this use-case to our service, it’s even worse. People are hosting business dinners and dates. If they get a cancellation the day before their dinner its terrible as they invited everyone already – if they get turned away at the door it is an absolute nightmare.
I want to showcase this customer: @PersonableLeaf11 at the time of writing the customer has bought 346 listings, and out of those 346 listings he had to either request a refund or received a refund 17% (!) of the time.
If we look at users like this: @PerceptiveWash44, @MaternalRecord73, @EnticingBaby13 or @ChattyPeace47 (and many more, as you can see in the medal list for yourself) we can see that users can move a large number of listings while maintaining a very low refund rate in the low single digits.
If we now look at the average refund rate of @PersonableLeaf11 and see that across 340 listings a 17% refund rate was accumulated it is likely due to the fact that @PersonableLeaf11 purchased a few listings from great sellers like mentioned above and accidentally purchased listings from sellers like these: @DecadentRoof69, @CuddlyRice61 , @CharismaticSkin17 or @ComfortingStone53.
I am surprised that we do have a few customers in the hundreds of listings range taking this high refund rate in to account.
If customers like @PersonableLeaf11 had a refund rate of 5% we would likely have hundreds of these people – which of course benefits you – the seller on AppointmentTrader.
Of course you’ll have a customer here and there who maliciously requests a refund or just doesn’t want to go anymore – that’s find and that’s normal that’s why we allow up to 10% refund rate for the lower seller medals that already offer great perks.
I spoke to both types of sellers to try and find a reason for the large discrepancy between the sellers.
Here is what I learned:
Sellers with a low refund rate care about every single listing they sell and fight for it.
If something goes wrong on their end they don’t just go ahead and cancel the listing and leave the customer with a credit and no reservation – they call the venue and try everything possible to get the customer in the seat after all.
To sum this up – I love this platform. I put every night and day in it.
It’s all I do, it’s what I dream of every night and talk about all day every day.
It was always my dream to make ‘Availability. Anytime. Anywhere.’ A possibility.
We are up against venues who don’t see that customers that are willing to pay a few dollars for a seat, rather than staying up until midnight and waiting for 30 days to go to a place, are the better customers.
And after looking at our demographics I learned that we are indeed _not_ serving predominantly rich people.
No it’s the young professional that want’s impress their boss or the college kid who’s going on a date – are there rich people on AppointmentTrader?
Sure – but most rich people know a guy who knows a guy and they purchase (sometime prepay, hint hint) thousand dollar dinners, I don't believe in that.
We are making it possible for anyone to go anywhere at any time for a few bucks – this is our mission and I want to do everything to make this a possibility.
So, please: If your refund rate got a bit out of hand, go to your profile, select show all medals and tap the magnifying glass icon to find a person to sponsor you the recovery medal so you can get back to business.
If you have a refund rate of under 7% please type on my wall (@ColorfulRod45) so I can hook you up with the City Area Administrator Medal which will allow you to sponsor people who have a high refund rate and put them on the right path.
You get two new sponsorships for every one sponsoree you lead back to under 10% refund rate.
There is a 10% penalty on all sales – roughly 5% go to your sponsor and 5% go to AT to cover all the chargeback fees the many refunds have triggered.
If we collectively get our refund rates to under 7% we will see unbelievable growth through customers who are coming back.
I love you guys – thank you for having built this wonderful platform with me – let’s take this thing to the next level.
1,30k views
10 thumbs up
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3 Answers
7 Comments |
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Answer from 👻 @NeighborlyAct20 (11/13/2023 11:05 pm)
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Anyone else find it extremely concerning that the only 3 people rushing to become sponsors are Appointment Trader insiders who approve majority of our listings?
What service do these sponsors provide for taking 5% of a seller's sales?
@ColorfulRod45 30% fee wasn't enough so now you want 35%?
Why not just round up to 50% fees on all sales?
Also, how are you getting chargebacks for refunded reservations? The seller never gets the funds transferred.
9 Thumbs Up
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2 Comments
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By 🥩 @FamousStation67 (11/14/2023 11:32 am)
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The implementation - not sure - sorry.
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By 🥷🏻 @ColorfulRod45 (11/14/2023 4:07 pm)
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No we do not want more fees. The goal is to incentivize sellers to stay under 11% refund rate -
The recovery medal is only a vehicle for the seller who did earn a high refund medal to get there - if there was no cost to it, there would be no incentive of getting rid of the recovery medal and therefore the whole thing would be pointless.
As said it's a 50/50 split with the sponsoring user - there is little financial incentive here for AT.
Low refunds mean high customer retention, which is the holy grail for all of us.
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Answer from 🍑 @BraveCloth47 (11/13/2023 5:03 pm)
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This is great. Holding sellers accountable and ensuring trust in the system will help grow and create more referrals and word of mouth advertising.
I see a lot of adjustments that the sellers will be making in the weeks and months. However, are you going to address the unethical practices by buyers on this site?
One issue in particular is that there are an overwhelming number of accounts being created on a daily basis, so much so that its come to the obvious conclusion that many of these bids are being put on the site by the restaurants themselves to ensnare sellers.
Other issues are buyers purchasing listings with 4 people and showing up with 2 or vice versa and then when they cant be sat, they cry foul and blurt out the fact that they purchased this reservation and should be sat(which immediately blackballs the seller and their Resy account, which cancels all future reservations) or come back on here and demand a refund because the restaurant didn't honor the reservation.
A lot of these issues can hurt a seller's reputation on here which affect the demand for said reservations.
Curious to hear any thoughts you have.
5 Thumbs Up
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3 Comments
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By ☃️ @FluentCork23 (11/13/2023 9:56 pm)
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I'm more-so wondering what is being done to help casual sellers? Imagine you're a seller with fewer than five sales and one is refunded. You have to more than double your sales in order to get back under the 10% range. Besides this recovery medal, it does not seem like there are guides or any help for people who are just starting out. It's great that some of these people have become top sellers but some of us are still picking this up and I feel like this change will only further separate the very top from everyone else (in addition to keeping excess cash within the AT ecosystem, perhaps indefinitely for some given all the constraints)
7 Thumbs Up|
By 👻 @CopiousMotion64 (11/18/2023 6:53 pm)
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But the execution here is a total miss. Here are my points:
1. The changes happened without any warning (or atleast I was not aware). For eg, in my case all cancellations happened 2 months ago, when I was very new to the platform and learning the ropes. That was a time, when AT was doing like 3M in total volume. Now, if I look at my last 2 months, there has not been a single cancellation, but without warning, I have this lable slapped.
2. Unless I am missing something the ACH transfer is now limited to 50$ and on that too there is a 5$ fee + .8%. Thats 10.8% on top of what AT already takes for a listing. Again I was holding money in my account, so that I dont have to pay these fee for every single transfer. Again no warning and I cant transfer.
@ColorfulRod45 - to grow the platform & to scale your business, sellers are going to be key. You have to think of how to provide a good onboarding experience for new sellers. Currently you have titled the game in a way, such that incentives for new sellers to learn about the platform and give it a spin are extremely low. As a seller, my trust on the platform took a dip for sure.
3 Thumbs Up|
By 🥷🏻 @ColorfulRod45 (11/13/2023 5:08 pm)
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Much appreciate the response and the proactive action of getting the recovery medal right away.
Of course you are right about the customers just as much, as any multi-sided marketplace buyers and sellers both need ratings, that is why we have purchasers and seller medals.
In the metrics on the user profile you can actually see that we also track customer refund request rates which will soon tie in to their medals and will limit new customers abilities to make many bids.
The reason I started with the supply side was that we had clear evidence that some sellers had a great refund track record and others had a terrible refund rate.
on the buy side the picture wasn't so clear, which largely had to do with the sellers' refund rates, which is why I wanted to make sure this end works first and then go on to the demand side.
thank you again for selling on the platform, and I do appreciate the comment.
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Answer from ⚡ @ConcisePower77 (12/18/2023 10:56 pm)
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ive been waiting for a response in the tickets, its not no one cares and this is starting to be really frustrating. I have money in the account thats settled and i cant take it out nor can i sell. nor do i get a response from anyone, what are we supposed to?
2 Thumbs Up
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