New online trading opportunities
Conducting
In this article I want to talk about one improvement, which is technically not very difficult, but, I think, very useful. The idea is that when selling over the Internet, you can set an algorithm for changing the price of goods. This article will be about how I came to her and what I did to implement it.
Sell an old computer
It all started with an old computer. More precisely with the fact that I decided to sell it and buy a new one instead. I wanted to sell as much as possible so that I had to pay less for a new one.
Rummaging through the Internet, I quickly determined the price range for the computer that I was going to sell. In general, placing an advertisement for sale on a free site, I waited for my buyer. I waited a week ... then another week ...., I waited, waited, until my ad expired.
The term has expired, but I did not sell the computer. But I did not despair, could not sell completely, you can sell in parts. After seeing how much spare parts are sold on the Internet, I disassembled the computer and put up for sale what it was made of. History repeated, the ad hung, but there was no buyer. Then I began to reduce the price ...
But reducing every day is a very tedious task. As a result, I set the minimum price for components and waited. And the buyer went ... I would even say that he ran. People called on the phone and asked not to sell to anyone, promising to come as soon as possible.
As a result, all my components were sold in a couple of days. People were happy, but I was not. It seemed to me that I had made a bad bargain somewhere. There was a feeling that I had lowered the price so much that I was literally flooded with buyers. The sale algorithm obviously failed somewhere. And he failed at the moment when I was tired of lowering the price a little bit every day.
And then I thought ...
Idea
And what if you expand the functionality of the site ads. Make it so that the price of the goods sold is automatically reduced every day !? In this case, I would find the buyer who would agree to pay the most for my components. Further I decided to generalize this idea. The seller, in principle, should be able to set the algorithm for the behavior of the price of their goods. This, on the one hand, will relieve him of the need to manually adjust the price, and, on the other hand, he will increase interest in the proposed product, since potential buyers will start tracking the price in the hope of buying at a better price. Algorithm of price change as it helps to find the goods sold by its buyer. As a result, this should simplify the sale and get the maximum benefit from the transaction.
Implementation
The next step was a prototype. I used C #, jQuery and Bootstrap, although at work I write in Java and Angular. I really wanted to do it quickly and see what happened, hence the choice of technologies.
In the process, I had to familiarize myself with the Google Maps API and how to compress and resize photos on the client side when the user loads them.
- I met C Google Maps API here: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/tutorial
- I compressed the resizing of photos using the project: github.com/rossturner/HTML5-ImageUploader
Time passed, the work was in full swing, and voila:
- YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eoCZW-3tlo
- The source code is here: github.com/AlexKorole/BuyAndSell2
Algorithms
A site has been made. On the seller’s page, the user can download product information and select an algorithm for changing prices. The following algorithms are available in this version:
- Price reduction from maximum to minimum
- Price increase from minimum to maximum
- Random price change, ranging from minimum to maximum
- Fixed price equal to the maximum
- Fixed price equal to the minimum
The screenshot shows the choice of algorithms:
You can also specify the price change step. For example: for 10 rubles every 3 seconds or 100 rubles every day.
On the buyer's page you can see the offered goods and the price for them. In order to see the price change algorithm, the “Admin” button was added.
If the “Admin” button is turned off, the “Price Status” column will not be displayed. In fact, it will hide from the buyer the type of price change algorithm chosen.
Conclusion
In this article, I decided to talk about the idea, which for a long time did not give me rest. Perhaps it makes some sense and can make online sales a more flexible and convenient tool, or, on the contrary, it will remain another idea that is not destined to be realized. In any case, I believe that it is interesting and worthy of publication.