Marketplace to sell pool related items?

[Hawk]

Why no dedicated forum for pool items to be sold to members? Both member to member and advertising vendors to members?
It would be a great way for TFP to generate advertising/vendor fees and give the members a place to sell unneeded pool related items.

 

[Patrick_B]

I'll answer on vendors from my perspective. I've been on other non pool forums with banners and commercial sellers and they are awful. Banners and pop-ups in threads and elsewhere make a forum experience painful IMO. Just terrible.

 

[8corneflakes]

I agree with vender ads. However, when we were in the middle of our pool build, I would have LOVED to be able to purchase some used stuff from the nice people here. For instance, my kids would love a basketball hoop for the pool, but I don't want to pay full price for something we would only use for a couple years. Likewise, I'm sure there are some empty nesters out there that would like to sell some family fun they don't use any more. Just a thought.

 

[Hawk]

I would imagine that best case scenario would be to keep the vendor banners or ads in the forum. That way if you're wanting to see them click in and look, if not, you wouldn't even notice if they were there.

I too would have loved to purchase directly from forum vendors. Having just upgraded to a new Intelliflo VF, new Easytouch, and new Stenner setup, I had to buy from vendors that I knew nothing about and I'm sure they didn't give me a second thought as well.
I now find myself replacing my EasyTouch 4 control board to increase from 4 relays to 8 and then selling a 2 month old board over on eBay. I'd much rather pass the savings on to a member here.

 

[JasonLion]

We used to have a for sale area, but no one posted anything for sale in it, so we got rid of it.

You can post non-commercial for sale items in the Coffee Bar area (if you have anything to sell).

 

[techguy]

I will say, if you read for while here, you will see vendors that are worth your business, we just don't have any "reviews" areas.

Based on my other forum readings, I have found having a review section tends to lead to bad behaviors and bad feelings. While it can provide a place for nice and happy customers to post nice and happy comments; it provides a single place for an angry customer to focus on their personal issues. The problem I see is that it's not a fair forum for the vendor to address the same issue. The vendor can't delve into a customers specific concerns in a public form and the non-public member gets to hide behind a screen name and throw dirt.

 

[duraleigh]

Excellent post, tech guy, and you nailed the dilemma pretty good.

While it seems obvious that peer-to-peer endorsements of vendors or products should be a good thing, you really never know if it is peer-to-peer or (often) masquerader-to-peer.

The moderators work very hard at filtering out "drive-by" slammers of products or manufacturers simply because we cannot possibly verify their story. While many complaints may be legit, competitors can pretend to be somebody else or personal grudges and experiences can completely cloud up any endorsement or negativity.

The "bad guy" almost never has the opportunity to present his side of the story so TFP frowns upon any rant from first-time posters or anything that looks suspicious...either in an endorsement or a slam.

TFP is quite proud of it's reputation as a friendly, mannerly place and the Moderators are the intuitive brains behind the scene that makes our reputation pretty darn valid.

 

[duraleigh]

Back to the original subject, I really pushed the idea of a "classified" section when seanB owned the forum.....it failed clearly and completely.

I think we removed it in less than 4 months.....there was simply no activity.

 

[techguy]

I read a scooter forum for years and it was similar to TFP, it was moderated and generally very positive and it has a couple vendors that are active posters but do not promote their product/store/dealership in the forums. Members do promote them when they see fit but when someone has an issue with the vendor, the conversation is not permitted and the poster is guided to contact the vendor directly and not permitted to air dirty laundry.