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Implemented changes to the GROUP BUYS subforum and the VToS
Photoelectric:
--- Quote from: riotonthebay on Thu, 16 February 2017, 14:31:38 ---
--- Quote from: Photoelectric on Thu, 16 February 2017, 14:28:49 ---
--- Quote from: xondat on Thu, 16 February 2017, 14:20:06 ---I see too many words and I get confused easily. The difference is if it fails or not.
Group buys can fail. You can place an order but it might never actually happen.
Pre-orders cannot fail. You will get your order in the future.
--- End quote ---
That's not entirely accurate: you can prepay for a product to be made, and the factory can make a mistake and mess up the materials you paid for, or do the wrong color, or result in defects, or tell you that something costs more, or send you stuff for assembly and you'll fail to put it together and ship it for whatever reason, or you'll be hit with high import fees, etc., etc. There are many ways a buy can fail, and it's a case-by-case situation.
--- End quote ---
I think what he's getting at is that the risk goes down almost an order of magnitude each time. Maybe 10% of group buys fail, but only 1% of pre-orders fail, and only 0.1% of straight up sales fail. (Those aren't meant to be exact numbers, but hopefully you get the point.)
--- End quote ---
That requires verifying that someone did in fact place a preorder (which you can't truly verify without requesting invoices posted, checking with manufacturer--which it probably won't confirm, etc.) Everything on the Marketplace requires a certain degree of trust. Since we can't prove that something is a preorder or not actually a preorder, we can't be separating stuff easily. The moderation team just does not have the amount of time or resources or knowledge of each individual situation (nor does it wish to get legally involved with each case) to monitor and maintain that these distinctions are made. We should not draft rules we can't enforce.
Hence the whole idea of Preorder / Group Buy was a simple suggestion, not a rule. That's creating confusion, so it doesn't have to be used. It's really down to the individual making a thread to make sure that the terms are laid out in a comprehensive and convincing manner. It should be clear from the description of a buy what the plan of the organizer is, and then you, as a potential customer, can decide if that's good enough for you to participate in. You can't fit everything into a title anyway.
pomk:
Have you thought about the for profit/non profit distinction as part of the gb/po choise? You could demand that (non-profit) GBs should keep their books open, otherwise the distinction makes no sense imo. For example in Finland it's OK to do this stuff for profit as an individual as long as the yearly total profit is below a certain limit.
Photoelectric:
That was the original intent. But what is and is not for profit will be a daunting task to prove for every individual buy, so the intent was to make it a voluntary option for buy starters to share, not a required one.
Moderation Team:
We have implemented the changes discussed in this thread, taking community feedback into consideration.
Group Buys section is now called Group Buys and Preorders.
There is a new information post describing the updated section here: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=88717.0
Vendor Terms of Service (VToS) have been updated accordingly (section 5): https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=43873.0
And finally, these two information posts have been updated as well:
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=81635.0
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=81634.0
Please feel free to continue posting feedback regarding the changes here.
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