pay for photo display?

medieval · February 8th, 2005, 12:10 PM

Is there any simple way to have the Paypal 'paid for' classifieds to have the ability to add photos and to have free ads to not have photos? Right now, the data directory is taking up 30% of my server space mostly from free postings, and I would prefer to have a 'free' option with only text and a 'paid' option for ads with photos. I'd afraid the bold, italics, etc. are not quite enough for most folks to make the switch.

Thx.

criscokid · February 18th, 2005, 11:06 AM

Excellent idea! Also the ability to position individual ads higher than others. Give people the ability to do this for an extra fee to go to the top of the list.

Chuck S · February 18th, 2005, 11:32 AM

Thats the greatness of php coding it can be modified to suit your needs.

Already did something like this for a user on a custom level.

Good suggestion for a future release

criscokid · February 18th, 2005, 12:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by omegatron

Thats the greatness of php coding it can be modified to suit your needs.

It's just a pain when it comes to product upgrades putting the code changes in to the newest version and keeping tabs on what changes you've made in a product. If things like this make into the product then there's no hassle about applying the customised code at each upgrade.

Solari · March 4th, 2005, 08:43 PM

This is something we urgently need as well!

Ray

caliman · March 25th, 2005, 09:45 PM

YES!

There needs to be a premium ad (pay) / regular ad (free) distinction built in.

Once this is done, then you can do cool stuff like only display premium ads using thumbincluder or inc_photopost on your homepage.

That way, they would be more inclined to pay for the exposure.

caliman

criscokid · April 1st, 2005, 01:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by caliman

Once this is done, then you can do cool stuff like only display premium ads using thumbincluder or inc_photopost on your homepage.

SUperb idea!!!

Rich Z · April 9th, 2005, 02:12 AM

This would work well with my FaunaClassifieds.com site, but with a twist. I would like to have the photo option determined in the user group section. In other words, I could turn this off/on via a checkbox as an option to any usergroup I choose. Since I have paid levels in my vBulletin site, it would be logical to add this as a perk to the paid memberships yet leave the non-photo ads for the free membership levels.

This also brings up another issue.

I would like to see each user able to set up a "pool" account where they could pay via PayPal a larger sum of money and each of those optional paid bells and whistles would draw money from this account. The reason for this is that PayPal takes a whack off of the top for every transaction. I am charging $1 per optional enhancement, and it stubs my toe on the fact that PayPal takes 33 cents out of that dollar, leaving me only 67 cents. I don't really want to charge less for each option, otherwise my account is just working to put money into PayPal's pockets, and not mine. So if a user could put in a larger chunk of money, then the PayPal hit won't hurt quite so bad.

Also looking from another perspective, this sort of arrangement with single charges per ad per enhancement tends to discourage high volume advertisers. $1 per hit doesn't sound too bad, but suppose you have advertisers who may want to place thousands of ads over a year's time? This will begin to get expensive for them. Sooner or later they are going to start asking about a volume discount, say like 100 options for half price or something along those lines, if they pay that amount in lump sum up front. Or perhaps as mentioned at the top of this reply, something like that could be tied to the user group level. A specified "prestigious" membership level would come with a set dollar level of bonus points that could be applied towards those paid enhancements. This would certainly encourage some people to ante up for that membership level, because they would see the benefits right off the bat for doing so. And on the bright side, it would leave much of the payment overhead up to vBulletin. vBulletin already handles this pretty well, with automatic notifications of pending expiration dates. All PP_Classifieds would have to do is to grant those special options based on the settings in the user group level.

artsculture · July 30th, 2005, 12:55 PM

I am very interested in this feature also. I recently purchased PP classifieds, but I don't want to release it until we can integrate the option to charge for photo enhancements like ebay does. Any ideas?

medieval · July 31st, 2005, 12:04 AM

I've had so many 'free' classifieds with photos posted now that I had to change hosting plans to have enough space. Great for adding registered users, but bad in terms of the negative cash outflow. Relatively few people seem willing to pay for the 'premium' upgrade for just bold or italic text, has any progress been made on integrating the 'pay for photo' feature? Or alterntaively, photos only via 'paid' usergroups? I share cricokid's thoughts that any custom changes would need to be easily integrated with future versions of the classifieds.

Chuck S · July 31st, 2005, 09:28 AM

Right now there is no active beta so this thread is here when its time to start

Jeremy · November 20th, 2005, 02:35 PM

You should consider offering X photos for free, and additional photos can be added for X price, with a maximum # of X hosted photos.

If all photos are free, then the number of free photos would = the max number of photos.

oldengine · November 25th, 2006, 09:37 PM

Add another person interested in this feature.

http://www.photopost.com/forum/showthread.php?t=128789

ArchangelX · July 17th, 2007, 02:43 AM

Same here! I'd really love to see this!