It'd be neat to have an additional market where users could post items they're looking to buy plus the price they're willing to pay. I looked around briefly and didn't see an existing suggestion for this, but if it's been said before I'll take this down! I'm very interested in hearing people's thoughts on this, so please drop feedback if you have any :)

Simple comparison of existing sell market listing and potential new buy market listing:


Purpose

• Having listed prices on both the buy and sell sides will help with item valuation, which a lot of users struggle with. Binary searching with sell listings to determine an item's worth is possible for high-quantity items, but if you only have a single copy of the item (eg. rare Nestor drops) it's not really viable. (In this case, I mean searching by posting listings that are too high/too low and narrowing down the range for the item's value if a listing sells really fast or if it never sells.)
  
  
• The market is a little inefficient at the moment - users looking to buy items that aren't on the Open Marketplace need to make threads in the Item Sales & Trades forum, but there are so many threads that it's hard to stay updated on what people are looking for. At a quick glance, there seem to be a lot of users who are actively looking to sell items but don't put those items on the marketplace - a new buying market would help them get in touch with users who are interested, assuming they indicate they're open to haggling.
  
  
• To add on to the above point, a lot of users have hundreds of specific items like clothing and decor pieces that would take too long to individually post on the selling market, so they never bother to post listings but would happily sell them if someone indicated they were interested. (I'm an example of this! I regularly post screenshots of > 100 decor pieces that I'm trying to get rid of, but I'm not really willing to spend the time to list and re-list them all. From what I've seen, I'm definitely not the only one.)
  
  
• Some buyers are patient and willing to wait a while to get a lower price, while some sellers are impatient and would like to liquidate as soon as possible, even if it means getting less for their item. Buy-side listings would help in both cases.
  
  
• Not too sure if this is a pro or a con, but playing both sides of the market (i.e. posting both buy and sell listings and making money off the price difference) could be an additional source of income for users who have the time. Pro: simple and accessible income source (that teaches market knowledge!), con: weighted towards users with too much time on their hands.

Logistics

• There are two options I see for handling money in these transactions - (1) is that the market takes your money when you post the listing, and gives it back if the listing expires, and (2) is that transactions fail and listings are removed if someone clicks "Sell" and you don't have the money in your active wallet. (1) is bad for people who are looking to buy a bunch of things but don't necessarily have the money for all of them at once, and (2) could result in the market having a bunch of listings that don't work because the buyers do not have money. A potential solution could be going with (2) and running a script every few minutes (or more often) that removes all listings where the buyer doesn't have that amount of money on them, to keep the market relatively clean. If someone clicks "Sell" and you don't have money, you'd still get a notification that your listing was removed for not having enough money with a quick option to relist.
  
  
• To parallel the structure of the selling market, taxes would be paid on the buying side. If you post that you're buying an item for 100 notes, and someone hits "Sell", 105 notes will be taken from you, 100 will be given to the seller, and 5 will be eaten in taxes. If you have 104 notes when someone hits "Sell", the listing will be removed, and both buyer + seller will be notified that the buyer did not have enough money.
  
  
• When browsing listings, the "Sell" button can be greyed out if you don't have the item in your active inventory. Unsure how much strain this would put on the servers to calculate this for every listing that the user views, but it would be very convenient.

Like one of those request posting boards in rpg games where npcs give quests for you to complete, only the requests are from other players?

@Rook Sounds about right

The site has gained thousands of new users since I posted this half a year ago. I'm bumping because I think the suggestion is now significantly more relevant, and I'd love to hear both new and old users' thoughts on it.

this.. i love this idea!! it would make selling things much easier

yes would love this

Foaming at the mouth, I'm surprised to see, not more mentions on this thread because it's SO GOOD, I'd love for something like this as someone who has a looot of base items but yet doesn't wanna list them all up at once only to do it again a week later anyway+With the constant changing market it's quite a hassle to list everything up only for it to change the next hour or day without me being aware of it

Literally picking this thread up and throwing it out the window out of affection, I would kill for this

Support! I have a ton of decor I never know how to price and a buy side market would help a ton! I could see using it myself for clothing too.

Support ^~^!

Support!!