New online trading opportunities

Conducting

In this article I want to talk about one improvement, which is technically not very difficult, but I think it is 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 the spare parts sell 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 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 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. Next, I decided to summarize 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, he will increase interest in the proposed product, as 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
• Resizing photos I made them 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 the price change algorithm. The following algorithms are available in this version:
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• 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, then 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 Internet sales 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.