K
Krelbit
Guest
TLDR: Store owners on this platform are making way too little in contrast to what they do. If put into hourly wages (which we do not earn), a large majority of this site's sellers are more underpaid than workers at McDonalds. Our prices have been slowly decreasing with the open market but as the market starts to become more barred, I see that our appropriate response is to raise the prices once again (albeit not too extreme, just so that our sellers can reach proper compensation for their time and effort into learning how to gen properly).
Another rant thread! Yay!
This one attacks low pricing and undercutting by sellers.
This rant is unlike my other rants. This rant isn't targeted at @doulie. I know, so surprising. This one's for the sellers who undercut and lower their prices to edge up on the competition.
Now, I love this site, and I love that I can sell pokemon on it, but is it worth it at the price I sell at?
I wanted to test this out, so I thought up a little formula for this.
Say your average seller takes 25 minutes to gen and sell a team of 6.
So we'll divide 25 from 60 and get 2.4. 2.4 sales per hour.
We'll multiply 2.4 by the price of your team, and that's how much PC you make in an hour.
500 x 2.4 = 1200 PC / Hour.
Now divide it by 150, and there's your USD profit.
1200/150 = 8
But wait, there's more! Multiply by 0.971 and subtract 0.3 to see what PayPal fees do to your payment.
8*0.971-0.3=7.47
Now that we've got an equation, let's apply it to every single price point on this site, starting from 300 and going in increments of 25.
I made a chart showing a perfect scenario on this site. This assumes that you can make 2.4 sales per hour, and as many sellers know, that simply does not happen. After asking around I see that most sellers average 5-9 sales a day. For the average 6-8 hours that we're on per day, we'd have to make 14 to 19 sales in our time here to earn this kind of money. We'd have no time to enjoy the company of the community, and no time to enjoy the site. We'd have to be sale robots for our entire time here.
At my current prices, if I were to make constant sales for 7 hours (lol) , i'd come out with USD $52.22 a day.
On average, sellers at my price level make 1-5 sales a day. That's $3-$16 a day, on a good day. You know who makes 22 dollars a day?
So now to the root of the problem. Competition. We all compete, and it small amounts it's a very healthy thing. But it comes to a point where you get some pretty rampant undercutting. Now, this price drop started in January of 15, when QR code genning came and never quite went away.
Like your weird aunt that moved into your basement and does nothing but collect old Beanie Babies.
At first, prices slimmed down from 300PC per pokemon to 200PC per pokemon. Looking at the graph, that was kind of okay, but was slipping. Fast forward to smea's release of homebrew for most of our current genning model. Prices flew down abysmally, hitting the 60 PC range, somewhere around $4/hour. As barriers started to rise and interest began to rise again, we were able to bring the prices up to 100PC, which is great, but there's still too much work to be done if we actually want to make our time worth something.
Now, since prices are so low, and they've been this way for so long, we can't bring our prices up without being counter-priced by our competitors.
To understand this situation fully, we'll have to take a look at the prisoner's dilemma.
This is a good video which goes over it.
We have to look at this at a standpoint to better the community. If everyone tries to serve themselves out here, we're going to collapse on our prices and we'll all be stuck in some weird storefront Wild West.
"But Krelbit!" You say, "I keep my prices low so people will come to my store, and then when I build a reputation, I'll raise my prices!"
No. It doesn't work like that. After you stick a certain low price point, your buyers become patrons to that ideology. Changing your prices will be incredibly hard, since your customer base is so used to your bullcrap cheap prices. If I go to Wal-Mart one day and buy a pack of gum for $1, and I come back the next day and see it's $3, and see a $1 substitute, I'm going for the $1 substitute.
We've got to raise our prices, and we've got to raise them as a community. If everyone raises their prices except one person, everyone's going to flock to that one person. Sure that person may see it as great, until they get swarmed with orders and see that they're making close to no money, even with all of their sales. This is when demoralization and bad quality come into their product, and may leave the buyer with a shitty impression of the site.
Sure, we may lose a customer here, or a customer there, because they don't have the willingness and ability to pay for pokemon. But the customers we get balance out the customers that we miss, and we can waste less time and do less work.
A market is defined by its price, its supply, its demand, and its barriers to entry. The barriers to entry on the pokemon genning market are starting to rise. Nintendo has patched freehax, blocking browserhax and menuhax access to newer updated consoles. With this new scarcity and barrier to entry in our market, we have the opportunity to actually make a decent amount of money for the time we spend here.
Please consider it, because this site's starting to finally pick up in popularity, and we're still basically making piss-all per day, and I say this as one of the current top 5 sellers on the site.
Chaos told me "I'm getting paid $18 per hour in my job. I dont feel like working for less than what I'm earning in my free time."
Even if we're not making $18 (That's $13.62 USD, probably before taxes, lol shit Canada) per hour (love you Canada), I feel like we should be making something a bit above what the greasy kid behind the McDonald's register is making. Actually, McDonalds workers will soon get paid at a starting $10 salary.
So really, we get paid less than the kid who sits at the register and sneaks a handful of fries every 5 minutes.
Edit: The article is a year old. We already get paid less than aforementioned child.
"Come on Krelbit, it's just a hobby, I do this for fun, not as a job."
Doesn't mean your time isn't still worth anything. I have a job and make a decent amount of money myself, and I believe if I choose to earn money during my free time, I should at least get a good damn amount of it.
"But Krelbit! No one buys from me. I need these low prices as a way to attract customers at all!"
No. You attract customers by being a decent human being and finding a niche. Niches are all the more common in competitive markets. Find a way to differentiate your store.
My personal niche is speed.
Yours could be customer service. Or very thorough gens, even down to the SID level.
There are lots of ways to carve a name for yourself and this is not acceptable that the only way you think to raise your customer base is by undermining the economy and community.
I'll take this as a chance to up my prices to 175PC per pokemon.
I implore you to do the same, if not, raise your prices at all. Try it for a week or two. I promise it won't be so bad.
Thanks for reading my shit rant. Have a great one.
P.S. I tried to John Oliver this one as much as I could. Comment some feedback for me! How did I do?
Hicken, M. (2015, April 2). McDonalds to give a pay raise to hourly workers. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/news/companies/mcdonalds-pay-raise/
Another rant thread! Yay!
This one attacks low pricing and undercutting by sellers.
This rant is unlike my other rants. This rant isn't targeted at @doulie. I know, so surprising. This one's for the sellers who undercut and lower their prices to edge up on the competition.
Now, I love this site, and I love that I can sell pokemon on it, but is it worth it at the price I sell at?
I wanted to test this out, so I thought up a little formula for this.
Say your average seller takes 25 minutes to gen and sell a team of 6.
So we'll divide 25 from 60 and get 2.4. 2.4 sales per hour.
We'll multiply 2.4 by the price of your team, and that's how much PC you make in an hour.
500 x 2.4 = 1200 PC / Hour.
Now divide it by 150, and there's your USD profit.
1200/150 = 8
But wait, there's more! Multiply by 0.971 and subtract 0.3 to see what PayPal fees do to your payment.
8*0.971-0.3=7.47
Now that we've got an equation, let's apply it to every single price point on this site, starting from 300 and going in increments of 25.
I made a chart showing a perfect scenario on this site. This assumes that you can make 2.4 sales per hour, and as many sellers know, that simply does not happen. After asking around I see that most sellers average 5-9 sales a day. For the average 6-8 hours that we're on per day, we'd have to make 14 to 19 sales in our time here to earn this kind of money. We'd have no time to enjoy the company of the community, and no time to enjoy the site. We'd have to be sale robots for our entire time here.
At my current prices, if I were to make constant sales for 7 hours (lol) , i'd come out with USD $52.22 a day.
On average, sellers at my price level make 1-5 sales a day. That's $3-$16 a day, on a good day. You know who makes 22 dollars a day?
So now to the root of the problem. Competition. We all compete, and it small amounts it's a very healthy thing. But it comes to a point where you get some pretty rampant undercutting. Now, this price drop started in January of 15, when QR code genning came and never quite went away.
Like your weird aunt that moved into your basement and does nothing but collect old Beanie Babies.
At first, prices slimmed down from 300PC per pokemon to 200PC per pokemon. Looking at the graph, that was kind of okay, but was slipping. Fast forward to smea's release of homebrew for most of our current genning model. Prices flew down abysmally, hitting the 60 PC range, somewhere around $4/hour. As barriers started to rise and interest began to rise again, we were able to bring the prices up to 100PC, which is great, but there's still too much work to be done if we actually want to make our time worth something.
Now, since prices are so low, and they've been this way for so long, we can't bring our prices up without being counter-priced by our competitors.
To understand this situation fully, we'll have to take a look at the prisoner's dilemma.
This is a good video which goes over it.
"But Krelbit!" You say, "I keep my prices low so people will come to my store, and then when I build a reputation, I'll raise my prices!"
No. It doesn't work like that. After you stick a certain low price point, your buyers become patrons to that ideology. Changing your prices will be incredibly hard, since your customer base is so used to your bullcrap cheap prices. If I go to Wal-Mart one day and buy a pack of gum for $1, and I come back the next day and see it's $3, and see a $1 substitute, I'm going for the $1 substitute.
We've got to raise our prices, and we've got to raise them as a community. If everyone raises their prices except one person, everyone's going to flock to that one person. Sure that person may see it as great, until they get swarmed with orders and see that they're making close to no money, even with all of their sales. This is when demoralization and bad quality come into their product, and may leave the buyer with a shitty impression of the site.
Sure, we may lose a customer here, or a customer there, because they don't have the willingness and ability to pay for pokemon. But the customers we get balance out the customers that we miss, and we can waste less time and do less work.
A market is defined by its price, its supply, its demand, and its barriers to entry. The barriers to entry on the pokemon genning market are starting to rise. Nintendo has patched freehax, blocking browserhax and menuhax access to newer updated consoles. With this new scarcity and barrier to entry in our market, we have the opportunity to actually make a decent amount of money for the time we spend here.
Please consider it, because this site's starting to finally pick up in popularity, and we're still basically making piss-all per day, and I say this as one of the current top 5 sellers on the site.
Chaos told me "I'm getting paid $18 per hour in my job. I dont feel like working for less than what I'm earning in my free time."
Even if we're not making $18 (That's $13.62 USD, probably before taxes, lol shit Canada) per hour (love you Canada), I feel like we should be making something a bit above what the greasy kid behind the McDonald's register is making. Actually, McDonalds workers will soon get paid at a starting $10 salary.
So really, we get paid less than the kid who sits at the register and sneaks a handful of fries every 5 minutes.
Edit: The article is a year old. We already get paid less than aforementioned child.
"Come on Krelbit, it's just a hobby, I do this for fun, not as a job."
Doesn't mean your time isn't still worth anything. I have a job and make a decent amount of money myself, and I believe if I choose to earn money during my free time, I should at least get a good damn amount of it.
"But Krelbit! No one buys from me. I need these low prices as a way to attract customers at all!"
No. You attract customers by being a decent human being and finding a niche. Niches are all the more common in competitive markets. Find a way to differentiate your store.
My personal niche is speed.
Yours could be customer service. Or very thorough gens, even down to the SID level.
There are lots of ways to carve a name for yourself and this is not acceptable that the only way you think to raise your customer base is by undermining the economy and community.
I'll take this as a chance to up my prices to 175PC per pokemon.
I implore you to do the same, if not, raise your prices at all. Try it for a week or two. I promise it won't be so bad.
Thanks for reading my shit rant. Have a great one.
P.S. I tried to John Oliver this one as much as I could. Comment some feedback for me! How did I do?
References
The iEconomy: How Much Do Foxconn Workers Make? (2014, February 24). Retrieved March 13, 2016, from http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/the-ieconomy-how-much-do-foxconn-workers-make/?_r=0Hicken, M. (2015, April 2). McDonalds to give a pay raise to hourly workers. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/news/companies/mcdonalds-pay-raise/
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