Feature Pipeline
June 6th, 2009
New Features in the Pipeline
Dashboard/Profile:
- Add Photo: Upload a photo or logo to make you more recognizable to other members on Zistle Launched 3/25/2009
- Add Website: If you are a blogger or have a website, you can list that information in your profile. Launched 3/25/2009
- My Gallery: Upload photos of your “prized possessions” to show them off to every one who visits your profile. This is a perfect way to display graded cards, through the mail autos and other collectibles.
- View Collection: This will allow other members to view your collection. Launched 2/16/2009
- Advanced Trade Settings and Trading Alerts: This will allow you to customize your trade preferences as well as see any new updates regarding your trading activity on your dashboard. For example, in your trade settings you will be able to default all of your cards as available for trade and default all duplicates for trade.
- Editable Box Breaks: You will be able to edit your Box Breaks in case you made a mistake. Launched 3/25/2009
- Comment Wall: Zistle members will be able to leave messages on your profile.
Collection:
- Teams: Add the team of the player for each card. Sort by team. Launched 2/15/2009
- Notes: Add notes to your collection that are for your eyes only. This is a great way to keep track of details about your cards that you want to remember but don’t apply to other people. Launched 6/5/2009
- Tags/Customized Collection Names: add tags to cards for more obscure information about your collection. Examples: TTM autos, Personalized Autos, Autos on Cards, Sticker autos, Wearing Mariners Uniform, Wearing College Uniform, Dented corner, PSA graded, etc. You will be able to sort and see all cards with a particular card.
- Detail View: This is an additional view that will allow you to see all details about your cards including notes, tags, attributes (auto, rookie) and eventually pricing information.
- Pricing: We are still in the preliminary stages of creating a reliable alternative pricing solution. We have pricing data available for many cards and plan to add a lot of advanced features once our pricing model is more robust.
Trading:
- Collect Teams: If you have a favorite team, you can add that to our WantList and it will add every card that is tagged with that team. Likewise, you can trade your least favorite team(s) on your TradeList. Launched 2/15/2009
- Upgraded WantLists/TradeLists: Your Want/Trade Lists will be searchable. When viewing someone else’s Want/TradeList, you will see any matching cards from your Want/Trade Lists
- Print WantList/TradeList: Print your WantList/TradeList to give to friends or take shopping at your hobby shop or a card show.
- Trading Platform: Propose trades with other Zistle members and track their progress to completion. You can build a trade card by card or work out the details with notes alone. Trade proposals can be accepted, countered or rejected. A note system allows you to ask questions without countering or rejecting. Once a trade is accepted by both members, shipping info is sent to the other member. Members rate the trade after receiving cards. The history of a trade is stored in an overview pane to allow to track the entire negotiation process. Launched 3/25/09
- Trading Dashboard: Allows you to see all current trade activity including incoming proposals, outgoing proposals, pending trades, completed trades, and trade recommendations.
- Trade Recommendations: Zistle will recommend trades based on your current Trade/Want Lists and Trade Settings. For example, “user324 has 33 cards from your WantList on their TradeList”.You will be able to view these on your trading dashboard.
Box Breaks:
- Compare Box Breaks: This view will allow you to compare all boxes in our system based on their ratings in the various categories. For example, if you are an autograph collector, you can sort to see which boxes have the highest number of autos/box based on our member box breaks.
- Add Vendor: Adding the vendor/store to your Box Break will allow members to search by vendor and see their ratings. This will help our members avoid vendors who sell re-sealed boxes.
- Add Box: Users will be able to add any boxes that we currently do not have listed similar to adding a card to a library.
Library:
- Advanced Library Tools: Help us complete sets and add images faster with advanced tools for adding multiple images and completing sets.
- New Sports: Soccer Launched 3/30/ 2009, Racing, Wrestling Launched 4/24/2009, Boxing
Other Cool Stuff
- WantList/TradeList Widgets for Bloggers
- Image Hosting
- Award Badges for Top Contributors displaying in profile
- Online Marketplace for members and vendors to sell their cards/collections
Do you have an idea for a new feature? Share it with us at our feedback page!
1. Could you please add me to your blogroll
2. Is there an easy way to add ALL the cards from a specific set?
3. If a card is not in the Library, does that mean it hasn’t been added by someone yet?
Thanks. Great start on this.
1. Of course. Only missed you by accident!
2. Unfortunately not. Do you think this would be helpful?
3. Yes, if a card isn’t in the library it needs to be added. All cards go through an approval process to make sure they aren’t spam and then they appear for everyone to see.
Thanks for stopping by!
Yes, I definitely think that adding all the cards from a subset or even a set would be helpful. My thumb is starting to hurt from clicking on 660 cards in the Topps base set!
Yes please add the option of adding entire sets! You guys rock! Keep up the great work.
We created a feature which allows you to add 100 cards at a time. Just go to list view, select 100 cards per page and then you can “add all cards”. It isn’t a whole set, but it is definitely better than 1 at a time!
Looks like you guys have a clear vision for your product. Keep up the good work. We should meetup sometime soon sine we are both in Seattle to discuss your app.
Would love to Josh! I’ll email you to set it up!
Would like to see how the website is doing as far as membership goes—how it’s growing. I totally agree with you guys and other blogs about the beckett experience and how they are bringing down the industry. This site seems to be what we are all looking for and I’m exciting to get started but I am nervous about completely cutting ties with beckett just to find out that this site is shutting down in a month or two due to lack of a following. If the site is low in membership let us know how to get the word out. If people are signing up in droves it only boosts my confidence to dedicate time reorganizing my collection here. I just found out about this site through a blog and am still exploring the features and maybe I’m not seeing what i’m asking for. So Far from what I’ve seen this site is awesome good job
Neil–We have no plans of shutting the site down, so please don’t worry about that. Please, please, PLEASE get the word out. While we have a solid foundation we always need more members. Also, since you are moving your collection from Beckett, let us know how that process works for you and if anything would make it better. Thanks!
I just want to point out that I had the same nervousness Neil mentioned. Didn’t want to start work adding my cards only to have something happen to all the work I’ve put in. So, thanks for the reassurance. And good work so far, it really is impressive what’s already there. I’ve already added a few thousand of my cards this weekend, which to me says how easy the site is to use considering how long it took just to add a few dozen cards to Beckett.
I did have a couple questions, though:
1) Is there anywhere on the site that explains how the pricing is gathered? I’m just wondering what the difference is between Avg Price and Low Price.
2) Is there any way to see which cards I’ve manually added to the list, or maybe even a particular user? This isn’t really necessary, but I would be curious to see, especially after I’ve added a lot more cards.
3) If I manually added a card, but that card was recently added by somebody else and is sitting in the approval queue, what happens? Do they merge, or do one of the requests in the queue get deleted? If deleted, is there anyway for me to know my card wasn’t accepted? Basically, I wouldn’t want a card I added to mysteriously disappear from my collection for some reason.
Thanks!
JPOnion – Glad you like it! It has been a ton of fun to build.
1) Right now we don’t explain it. But Avg is the essential the average price of a number of different readings including ebay and checkoutmycards. Low is the lowest that we have seen it go for. Just because people are offering it for on average $X knowing that the lowest offer is $Y gives you a more realistic idea of what you could actually get for it in a pinch. This is also by far the least developed of our features and if you have ideas or suggestions we are totally open to them.
2) Right now there is not. We give credit on the card popup (if you click) but you can’t see a list of them. Right now the best proxy for something like that is the leaderboard on the library tab. We are thinking of adding something like this though and also showing you which cards you have that we don’t have scans for (to encourage you
)
3) If you manually add a card and it ends up being a dupe of another we merge the cards. So, it will remain in your collection.
Your Pricing is a real disappointment and you should kill it until you can do it right. There are so many methodologies you should look into for determining proper pricing guidance, and you obviously haven’t thought it through at all.
On your homepage it says you base it on real transactions, but it is pretty obvious you are just using results from the Google Base API (which is not real transactions, but cards being offered for sale). Very lame and deceiving.
Other than that, your site is impressive and well executed. Excellent search indexing and use of ajax libraries. There’s potential here, but a HUGE way to go to really make an impact.