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WTF Furbuy?!
15 years ago
UPDATE: See comments, or this journal: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1886356/
So, I went to post an auction on Furbuy, and suddenly, I'm confronted with this:
"Free users are limited to 3 live auctions at any one time. You may try posting your auction again later, once one of your current auctions has ended.
Free users are also now limited to only $400.00 in sales per calendar year, as this is the amount a seller in the United States can make through our site before having to file income taxes. If you've made this much or more already this year, we'd like to encourage you to contribute to our site by purchasing a contributing membership."
WTF, $400 rule since when? What on earth is up with this? (NB: I have no auctions running)
I remember when Furbuy was saying they weren't "out to make money like Furbid", but clearly times they are a-changing. The excuse of filing for income taxes is nonsense, because why then would they let you away with that for giving them $18 a year? Bribe under the table or something? Also, I'm not in the United States, so the point is moot.
Furbid was pretty dead, but now, I'm just about tempted to return there, because at least they weren't being this shady. Ugh.
So, I went to post an auction on Furbuy, and suddenly, I'm confronted with this:
"Free users are limited to 3 live auctions at any one time. You may try posting your auction again later, once one of your current auctions has ended.
Free users are also now limited to only $400.00 in sales per calendar year, as this is the amount a seller in the United States can make through our site before having to file income taxes. If you've made this much or more already this year, we'd like to encourage you to contribute to our site by purchasing a contributing membership."
WTF, $400 rule since when? What on earth is up with this? (NB: I have no auctions running)
I remember when Furbuy was saying they weren't "out to make money like Furbid", but clearly times they are a-changing. The excuse of filing for income taxes is nonsense, because why then would they let you away with that for giving them $18 a year? Bribe under the table or something? Also, I'm not in the United States, so the point is moot.
Furbid was pretty dead, but now, I'm just about tempted to return there, because at least they weren't being this shady. Ugh.
Check it out. Totally free and I you have any problems just let me know and we can take care of it :)
Http://www.thedealersden.com
I don't believe anyone will be crying if your site is shut down due to the free alternatives available.
We're currently talking about the limit now and we're going to raise it. Instead of $400 we're discussing something more in the range of $800-1,000 instead. Apparently I had gotten some math wrong, and there's some issues and fallacy in the US tax argument, so we're going to remove that hubbub.
As for the limit, we have just completed raising it to US$900 and we have removed the notices about tax law as they have no relation to our site itself or our international users. Thanks again for your feedback.
You should definitely do everything you can to spread the word about this. It's super shady and those guys shouldn't be pulling this shit at all. And the worst part is most people won't even know they're trying to pull it off... because I mean, really - who sells THAT much stuff on there?
has nothing to do with us tax laws, nor does it have anything to do with the new irs law 6050w -- just a tag-on to encourage you to buy a membership, lol. if they want or need to become a pay or microtransaction service, you do what you gotta do i guess, just things have definitely changed.
i can dig that they may now need to make their ends meet. but if you need to make money for your service -- offer sensible microtransactions and things with a proven track record that people like and buy, not some bogus quasi-trying-to-police-you (what does that sentence even have to do with anything? it's not their responsibility to police people's taxes, and they aren't dispensing payments, so not affected by new legislation over here) thing.
WHO KNOWS, weird site, ebay or the dealers den which seems to be up and coming all the way. furbid i think has mostly died.
We're also sorry that we somehow left a bad taste in your mouth, we've just been trying to provide the highest quality experience we can to users, while also trying to support the site via user contributions in return for features like ad banners or expanded accounts. We do our best to mediate issues between buyers and sellers and provide a clean, secure system with a positive reputation, but sadly you can't please everyone and sometimes we have to step on toes when folks wind-up at odds.
however, i'd also recommend talking with the bank your business or 501 has its primary account with about processing direct payments. you absolutely don't need to be making 'millions of dollars per month' to maintain a reasonable income via microtransactions or mintransactions (below $12 avg. payment) with as little as a few thousand gross per year. there's a reason so many minigames and startups are doing it -- if you plan your structure out, it really does work.
However, I'm not sure it's something we'd want to do with FurBuy. The only way that model would work with an auction system is by charging small commission fees and feature fees on a per-use or per-sale basis, and again it requires a lot of extra processors and tracking and more line-items for us and for users to have to deal with. Assuming we had a real development staff and not a couple guys who do development in their spare time in order to contribute to the community, we could consider setting up a system so complicated - but again I don't think it's something that we even want to embrace philosophically. Annual subscriptions are easier to track and manage both for our staff, and for users of the site. Our current models work using a seller's hard sales as the baseline, and it's a lot easier to put advanced features behind a "paywall" than to mete each one out individually and charge a micro fee. Furbid has been trying that strategy for years now, and it quite probably was what sunk them.
You should be watching Flayrah - we had a post about it. RSS, LJ, Twitter and Facebook subscription available!
Looking back, it seems that there was a lot of bad feeling about FurBuy and you personally. While this looks to have been expressed in the comments, rather than the stories, the former site administrators do appear to have shared those feelings. I was not around seven years ago, but I'd hope things have changed a little since then, on all sides.
We're not looking for promotion, and reserve the right to edit or refuse posts containing it, but an advance notice of the recent change at FurBuy would have been welcome.
I'll keep Flayrah in mind for the future, but we make a lot of changes on FurBuy fairly regularly. Perhaps not as big or "meaningful" as this recent new restriction on free accounts, but it's hard for me to know where to draw the line between "promotion" as you say and just getting useful information out there for folks.
How hard would it have been to just send out a news letter to your users? Seriously, it's sneaky as shit especially after how long you guys went on about the whole 'WE'RE FREE!!!' thing.
Also, the journals are not arbitrary - we have links posted to them from our MAIN PAGE and tell folks to go check them out and watch them in order to be kept up to date with changes and upcoming issues. As for sending out mass e-mails, that's another very controversial topic for two reasons: one is that people hate spam and hate unsolicited e-mail pouring into their mailbox, while maybe 10-20% of our users would have enjoyed getting mail about these changes, another 20-30% would have complained profusely and possibly even closed their accounts or changed to a non-responsive e-mail address had we canvased them like that. The second issue is that as mail servers have become more complex with richer spam filters and security measures, sending legitimate e-mails has also become harder to do, esp when sending en-masse and FurBuy has over 11,000 registered accounts (with over 16,000 e-mail address). We can't afford the grade of technology and certificates required to send bulk e-mail reliably and in a way that we're sure will reach users' mailboxes.
If your TOS changes, then your uses need to be notified. ALL of your users, wither they've given false addresses, or their mothers are sick, or they have a cicst on their arse about getting 'junk' mail or not. You can't punish 90% of your userbase and just sneak in limitations because 10% gets upset about an email that they think might be spam. Let them opt out of getting emails, if they wish, but... really?
It seems to me that your reasoning is quite paper thin. I understand completely the need for funds to run your business, but there's no need to be underhanded and 'sneak' the fees in as it were. You talk like you were open to input then - well right now you're getting quite a lot of input about this so maybe you should take it to your business partners and discuss how people are reacting to it because clearly it's not coming across in a very good light.
If they don´t turn this decision back, I´m leaving Furbuy too. I also remember the times when the site was starting and pointing out the flaws of Furbid. This is far worse than any wrong thing Furbid used to have.
So don´t be surprised if artists start to flee to other sites that are free, even if less popular. Getting popular is just a matter of time.
We're not trying to steal from the mouths of starving artists, what you do costs money and supplies and you do it because you love it and you don't make as much as you like - we're no different from you. What we do isn't free, it's coming at a major cost to our admin staff to keep the site running when we don't get enough contributions, and then on top of paying out of our pockets for it, we're also putting in a lot of our hours and effort to improve it and keep it running smoothly as well. I personally hate to be asking for your hard-earned money to help support the site, but unfortunately as MY money is dwindling and I can't barely afford to buy art anymore, I also can't afford to pay for FurBuy by myself. It's really a simple situation: FurBuy either pays for itself or it has to go down. That choice is in the hands of the community.
I'm not too shy about numbers and figures, I crunch a lot of stuff from the database. And FurBuy's records are mostly public, the biggest thing we do not share ever is personal/private data about a user or their specific individual combined sales. Whether or not someone wants to share that is up to them, we've made a commitment to protect their personal and individual privacy on FurBuy. The biggest thing that blows my mind is that we recently crossed the $250,000 in total sales on FurBuy (and that doesn't include Dutch Auctions and Reserve Auctions!) for all combined sellers in 2010. And there's still a good 5 weeks to go. =) That's (to my knowledge) more than any single furry convention has had in art show sales in any single year. And unlike them, we don't charge panel fees, dealer's table fees, commission fees or taxes. ;D
I won't be using this site anymore for auctions. XP
I don't mind the please pay type thing, I do think an e-mail to those who opt for it would be good, not monthly but just one for bigger updates. I'd raise your minimum too, as someone else said, to about $1000. $400 is nothing these days, and most fursuits start at $500 or more. It'd be more fair to those, and if you really had to, take a percentage of the auction, if you post something worth more than $400-500 say they donate a dollar to your site? Kind of what ebay has done, but not for the lower priced things.
As for the membership not getting applied, please send an e-mail to admin-team[at]furbuy.com with the details about who the seller was (e-mail address if you have it) along with your own username on FurBuy and we'll look into it this evening for you. So far as we know we've never missed applying a membership, but if we have we definitely want to correct it for you! Thanks again.
FurBuy has gotten too big and too high-traffic to remain free. You've made an awful lot of money from selling things on the site. This year so far already a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS of merchandise has been sold through FurBuy. We've received about $800 in donations to run a site which costs $5,500 per year to run, and we'd like the folks who are making the most money from using the site to pitch in a little.
$18 a year is NOT much to ask, it's $1.50 per month and gives you a ton of additional features plus it helps keep our staff from having to foot 100% of the bill to keep the system running. WE are already investing a great deal of our personal time and effort into keeping the site running smoothly, taking care of security concerns and mediations behind the scenes, and adding new features constantly. We're just asking that YOU, as a seller who has made over $400 from the site this year, do your part by becoming a contributing member. Is that seriously too much to ask? $18 is less than 2% of the $400 (or more) profit you've made for the year there already, most auction sites like eBay take a much larger percentage than that PER SALE. We only ask for an annual contribution that's simple and tiny, and after you make it the more you sell the less that contribution cost you in the bigger picture.
Had we KNOWN that this kind of community backlash would occur, and we really DID ask - you can check our journals here on FA at
If a $400 cap on sales for free users per calendar year is too hard to bear, then what IS bearable for you to contribute to the site? A 0.5% commission fee that we charge you on each sale and you don't get to post another auction until you pay-up? That's not working so well for Furbid right now, and folks are sick of that on eBay too.
As I said in the above comment - if you really cared about informing your userbase, you would have sent out an account notices via your website, not posted elsewhere on unrelated sites.
Regardless, people were going to complain anyways.
The journals were necessary because people had a huge backlash to being mass-mailed and demanded an opt-in system of being informed of updates, changes and ideas for the site. Since the vast majority of users on FurBuy have either LJ or FA accounts, that's where we set them up.
But you're telling me I've made an awful lot of money and an awful lot of profit - that's hardly true. I get minimum wage or less for my art. I'm disabled and this is a tiny supplement to my income. I think I made $220ish on commissions and had to sell my fursuit to keep afload after moving abroad. Please don't talk to me like I'm raking in cash at your expense.
I appreciate you need to keep the servers going, but this is not the way to go about it. It's underhanded and nonsensical. Especially saying "oh it's because of tax", because we all know that's nonsense, and no one can respect a lie like that. If you were upfront and informed members properly by email about coming changes to the site, then I wouldn't be making a "bawfest" about it. (And if you think I make so much money on Furbuy, is that really the way to talk to me about this? Hell, I was strongly considering paying the fee anyway, but being spoken down to is extremely distasteful)
As for sending out mass mails, the last time we did that we got so many complaints and people changing their e-mail addresses to non-existant ones, people have made it clear they don't want to be "spammed" with notices.
I don't believe that an email of that nature would be spam. Even sites that pledge not to send newsletters will mail with a terms of service update. That's all you needed as the title for people to be aware you were not spamming them; "Terms of Service Change".
You've received some feedback on the system in this thread, and I assure you that had I known about your request that people follow the Furbuy FA I would have done so, but I only really visit the site to sell, and that's not often.
I would suggest either pricing on things like bold, featured, extra pictures etc, or having a better limit set up. I.e. having a max number of auctions per month before charging perhaps, upping the limit to something more reasonable ($800-1000), encouraging more advertising with a clearer pricing structure and information page, or charging people who post more than a set number of auctions per year. $400 is going to affect an awful lot of sellers who are not high-volume users.
Excellent points and ideas, and we're already planning to work toward implementing them ASAP. The limit based on number of auctions per month was already something we planned to implement if we needed to, but we thought the sales cap would be more salient. We are going to raise the limit, the number we're bounding around right now is $900 - that will get done TODAY. I'm working wither another admin right now on plans to implement a new communications system and allow users to manually opt-out from admin notices but they will get them by default.
As for my disability, while I'm legally disabled I do still try to hold down jobs, but I have to work reduced hours and take lower-paying jobs than I could when I started FurBuy. So while when I was younger it was easy for me to pay the bill (and indeed I was happy to), these days I watch that $400 slip through my fingers and it hurts a lot more than before.
Hopefully we can keep your support as a seller and maybe find a way to get folks like you more involved in the feedback loop. Without hearing from users, we're left to looking at numbers and trends and ideas and just trying things out to see how they work purely by how the numbers pan-out. It's good to hear from real people and get good ideas and response from our community, feel free to give us your thoughts and questions anytime!
That being said, FurBuy's always willing to co-integrate with 3rd party sites - we've been working with FA for years along those lines. Nobody else has approached us about it, and our requests to do so with other sites have usually fallen idle.