Mixed groups formed from existing individual ads [#3993]

Marketplace Support Feature Requests
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The introduction of the mixed group feature to allow us to legitimately sell groups of animals together is a step in the right direction.

Having played about with it last night I’m left a little underwhelmed with how is been implemented, along with the restrictions in the rules which basically say you can either advertise an animal on its own, or in a group… But not both.

I have individual animals for sale, but I would also like to present curated groups of those animals for sale, to give potential buyers ideas for a potential project and to show clearly what the total cost for that might be i.e. probably lower than the individuals purchased separately.

The suggestion:
Rework the group feature so that you can form the group from existing individual ads (and lift the prohibition on animals being sold individually and as part of a group)

This would allow the individuals in the group to be viewed, along with each animals genetics, pictures etc rather than it just being presented in a lump and having to put details in the description.
It would also allow more flexibility for sellers, and allow them the opportunity to present ideas and better value to their customers.
If an animal sold either individually or as part of the group then because they are linked both ads could then be taken down at the same time (which presumably is one of the reasons why an animal can’t be in a group and an individual ad? I have to say I don’t really get why it’s prohibited :sweat_smile:)

4 Likes
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I love this idea, I would definitely utilize it.

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@dragons_llab Thank you for the thoughtful feedback! It spurred internal discussions.

First, your idea to add more tooling around this so that a seller can just pick a few ads and then create a group ad based on those other ads (whether the singles are visible or not) is a great idea.

TBH, we rolled out this change (it’s mostly just a rule change), because we realized that it had a lot of upside without a lot of downside. While we are not focused on this right now, it wasn’t much effort so we were able to get that done right away.

What your are proposing is a lot more work and we won’t get to it soon, but I have filed a ticket for this idea for the future.

Second, as you pointed out, the new rules still require an animal to be only listed once. As you suspect, the reason is that we’re worried that this will otherwise results in more stale ads due to the management requirements. We already have that problem and it will make it worse to some extent.

Now we debated internally which has more cost/benefit: more permissive on the rules or less room for stale ads. This is hard to assess. For now I think we are going to keep the rules as they are and monitor.

But one day when we implement more tooling around this as you proposed, that problem would go away.

Thanks again!

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Thanks for taking the time to respond, I look forward to seeing where it goes on the future :slightly_smiling_face: