Silk Road forums
Support => Feature requests => Topic started by: zydrate on July 21, 2011, 09:00 pm
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As a buyer on SR, I feel like much of my time here was spent waiting for sellers to respond to an order - I've had to cancel several orders due to no response for more than a week. This appears to be a weakness of the feedback system: a buyer who never hears back from a seller has no chance to leave feedback. It seems like there's an easy solution to this:
1) For all sellers, show the average amount of time it takes for an order to be shipped from the time it was made.
Or, if that's too much information,
2) Show the percentage of orders that go to completion and aren't cancelled by the buyer/seller.
This would both give buyers some information about who to buy from to ensure a response, and act as an incentive for sellers to respond to orders in a reasonable time.
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From what I can see you can get the major bulk of product type from the well-known sellers, just pop a post up in the forums and if you like what you are offered, take it to SR.
I know some of the other sellers I talk to are getting 75-100 messages a day. It's pretty crazy to manage, and sometimes i'm sure a lot of stuff is just skimmed and not replied to becuase there is just too much replying to do.
If you are having trouble with certain sellers just ignoring you, post that in the forums too. Sometimes sellers need a kick in the ass in full view of the community to get their shit together and start hustling for their customers. I've seen it work a couple of times already, and if you post that you are pissed about order-to-ship times if there are other customers in the same boat they will mention it to. Another seller who carries the same line will be more than happy to come on by and say "hey, check out my goods".
In short, I think the forums are the best tool for this kind of thing, and we already have it waiting to be used....
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Yep: I agree with anarcho ... our main objective should be to get the buyers--and sellers-- to the forums, where they can find out what is happening, and post a thread if it isnn't already addressed. We've already had a couple of sellers that were just too swamped to answer individual pm's and they could post here and we could pass it on and yap about it, and they could get back to work :)
The flip side of this is that often *buyers* are lax in finalizing order: they get their shit, go off and party, and totally forge that sellers don't get paid until they finalize. So it works both ways. I just don't think SR itself is a good avenue for pm's or discussions with sellers, particularly since most of us want it to be in PGP anyway, and that just makes it harder...easier to come over here, and what we need to be doing is finding a way to ensure that that happens.
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Yep: I agree with anarcho ... our main objective should be to get the buyers--and sellers-- to the forums, where they can find out what is happening, and post a thread if it isnn't already addressed. We've already had a couple of sellers that were just too swamped to answer individual pm's and they could post here and we could pass it on and yap about it, and they could get back to work :)
The flip side of this is that often *buyers* are lax in finalizing order: they get their shit, go off and party, and totally forge that sellers don't get paid until they finalize. So it works both ways. I just don't think SR itself is a good avenue for pm's or discussions with sellers, particularly since most of us want it to be in PGP anyway, and that just makes it harder...easier to come over here, and what we need to be doing is finding a way to ensure that that happens.
Interestingly I have never had a seller delay a sale, nor have I had to message a seller to ask them about where my order is. However what is surprising is that a seller has never messaged me whether a delivery arrived or not.
If you want to shoot for perfect customer service a vendor would message you to afterwards to make sure everything is ok, but this is drug dealing not a shoe shop.
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I message all my customers after 10 days to finalize and as whether the order arrived, and how everything is going. :)
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I tend to be brief and businesslike. I doubt they want to chat endlessly about my views on the world, and if anything, they should be wary of buyers who ask too many questions, or try to become their new best friend.. If package is running really late, I'll pm saying 'what's up' and leave it be again for a couple days. I've not had a problem yet that wasn't resolved fairly, most of my products have arrived, and the time it didn't, the seller made it right. Once seller cancelled in a suspicious way, and we have discussed him in a thread, warning others off. If I want to bullshit, I do it in the forums. I distrust pms anyway, and especially if they aren't in pgp. I don't like to ever loose site of the fact there are some serious penalties involved in these transactions, and to act accordingly.