Halp: Fees-Random Plaza

Help With Fees

Internet Money

1 euro	10,000 internet money
1 internet money	1/10,000th of a euro
1 cent in euro	100 internet money
1 internet money	1/100th of a cent in euro

(One euro is near the amount of one dollar in most currencies or one British pound.)

Listing for Free vs. Listing for Fee
The purpose of the fee to list is basically just to prevent flooding attacks and that's it. It's so low that you probably won't be able to find physical currency in an amount lower than the fee to list. However, since you probably don't care about that, there's extra features if your listing isn't free.

Free Listings

I've you have never had funds in your account, have exactly 0 funds in your account, or are posting as Anonymous, then you can post 30 free listings per day per IP address. You are also allowed to change your IP address to list more on the same account in the same day.

With free listings, the upgrade to a larger description is free whether you add it initially or you add it later by editing the listing.

Free listings do not show up in one's funds history.

Fee Listings

If you have funds in your account, then your listings will be fee listings. Fee listings will show in your funds history.

Price per day in internet money	Description
1 internet money	base price per listing
1 internet money	additional fee to increase the maximum description size from 5,000 characters to 40,000. This fee is charged because longer descriptions cause our servers' search system to work much harder, particuarly because a character may be 4 bytes long in utf8 chracter encoding and utf8 is searchable. This additional rate also enables to you use free bulk templates in the listing.

Benefits of fee listings:

Having funds in your account so when you receive an offer from a registered user, you're able to accept it, though you need a certain amount of funds
Being able to save and use a basic template when creating a new listing
Bulk Templates -- Instantly update the text in infinite listings at once.
Be able to save a URL in your listing that can be checked (meant for dropshippers) for a certain phrase along with a lot of other listings of yours in bulk to see if the dropshipper stopped carrying the product. -- You can save the URL now but the feature to check is coming soon.
Uploading files to your listing using a remote website -- You have to pay 100,000 internet money to enable it and after that it's hard to get your funds back down to 0 where you can do free listings again, although if you do manage that, you can do the free listings and upload your files remotely.

Accepting offers to have the feedback count as legitimate

Price in internet money	Description
10,000 internet money (one euro)	fee to accept an offer and have the feedback for it counted

For feedback marked as paid, the seller was charged a fee equivalent to one euro. This is done for the benefit for sellers and buyers so that their feedback is understood as real.

There are community marketplace websites out there that are 100% free, but when they're completely free, then sellers can stuff their feedback with ease. There are other such websites that are not free, but charge a percent commission so a person can list many listings that end for pennies and get lots of fake feedback. In both cases, the feedback cannot be trusted.

Our charge isn't a commission so you can sell something vastly expensive and not have to pay more than one euro.

If the buyer does not pay, then the seller can opt to get their fee back and then the feedback for the transaction is noted as unpaid. If a seller uses this properly, then it will protect them from cases where someone pretends to be a buyer just so they can leave a bad comment. If a seller is uses it dishonestly, then their feedback won't look as good and they'll also get no protection so people can't tell when a person doesn't pay and just pretended to be a buyer to leave a bad comment.

Padding an account with fake feedback also is not necessary on this website. Let's say someone sellers cars. On Random Plaza, our feedback is not scored by things like positive, neutral, or negative so someone who can't think more than typing a single letter in their feedback can't have their lack of thought counted as much as 1999 other people's feedbacks by simply marketing it negative (if feedback is scored on a xx.x%, then one needs 1999 positive feedbacks to return to 100.0% after a single negative.) For the selling of cars, if someone leaves feedback for "Small scratch in paint" and the seller responds with "Was mentioned in listing with photo of scratch" then it does not look bad. If the buyer could rate that comment negatively, the tiny issue would make the seller look horrible with such a type of product that sells low volume, which is what would often happen on a feedback system with ratings. Instead, the comment must be read and it just says there was a small issue and simply says to read the listing closely, and honest sellers want their listings read fully.

What if you get an offer from a registered user and have no funds in your account?

Well if you have no intention of ever paying fees to our site, then you'd best just list as Anonymous where it's more efficient for sellers since you never are charged fees. If you are listing as a logged in user, then you'll have to tell everyone to only bid as Anonymous so you get no fees and cancel all offers from registered users, and this is really annoying so it's best to just list as Anonymous if you want to be cheap.

However, if you haven't added funds because you doubt any of your items will sell on this website, then you'll first need to add funds. If you added it by noca, then the funds will take several days to go into your account and after doing so you then need to request free funds and Random Plaza staff will grant a credit to your account so you can accept the offer.

Internet Money and Our Payment Methods
For our website to allow users the freedom that it does, we require that everyone prepays. We do not require large amounts of personal information or do heavy spying on users. Thus, if we allowed people to pay later, then many would skip out without paying. As explained in our safe trading guide for product listings, we also only take reasonably safe payment methods as for things like credit card chargbacks, banks do not inform merchants of these for two months and each chargeback is very expensive and eats up the money paid by hundreds of honest users.

For lack of a better name, we call prepaid funds in your account "internet money". To make it international and the same for everyone, it is fixed based on the euro, even though we are in the United States and you might be paying for funds in a currency other than euro. Funds you prepay are basically like a merchandise credit and what we call "internet money" is not real money, just prepayment for services. We refund surplus amounts as explained later on this page.

Let's say that you prepay in US dollars. The exchange rate we have stored and cached is calculated for what that amount converts to in euro to many decimal places (usually ten), and then the equivalent in "internet money" is added to your account.

Another advantage is if this site becomes popular and we raise our fees, we usually will raise the conversation rate to internet money so anyone who has prepaid will have saved money in the long run.

Refunds will be based on the money you paid into your Random Plaza account initially, which we will need to check so this is a time-consuming, manual process and so there will be a small service fee, generally about 5 euro. Funds given as free credits such as for promotions are not transferable to real money. For all refunds, we will deduct any costs we incur to transfer the money to you. If we go out of business, we will try to refund everyone even if it takes a while (which it might).

Our current payment methods are:

noca.com -- Does eChecks. USA-only. Unlike paying by Pecunix, eChecks takes a couple of days to settle before the funds are available in your account. This can go as low as one penny in US dollars. Noca also claims some promotion of giving all new users $5.
pecunix.com -- This is an electronic gold service. We take Pecunix, but it is not integrated into our website because Pecunix does not have a test mode for website integration so live funds must be used and it is a pain to get money into a Pecunix account since it requires a wire transfer and micropayments are no good. If anyone wants to transfer money into our account, then we will consider that people are interested in paying with it. The first people to pay through it will get 10x the credits in internet money until we update this page to remove this offer. Our Pecunix email address is in the View/Add funds page when you log in.

Logged in users, go to the "View/Add Funds" page to pay.

Please note when we receive payment, we add the amount to your account minus any fees we incur to receive your payment. This keeps it fair to all users as some may have paid in ways where they paid to transfer funds instead of us. Noca.com currently has no fees while it is in beta testing and says they plan to go up to a maximum of 0.5% with no fixed per-transaction fees.

Another option to add funds is our promo feature to get free listings.

Unless you have money in a Pecunix account, you should keep a small amount of funds prepaid in your Random Plaza account because when an offer comes in from a logged in user, the buyer will not be willing to wait several days for you to get a slower payment into your account. You also don't want to just tell everyone to only make anonymous offers because legitimate-looking feedback is what helps sales.

Details on our Fees to Post Product Listings
As for the other infinitesimal tiny fee to have a larger description, some community marketplace websites will let you do things such as making your listing bold and stand out for a large fee. This costs that website nothing, just putting in a tiny HTML start and end tag for bold, and that's it. But the seller is charged a large fee for the advertising. This is basically, to use the gambling term, a "sucker bet". For listing items, the cost to us is not just the listing itself, but a lot of it is in the system of searching for items. That is why we charge extra for longer descriptions for the cost of indexing all those extra words.

You can do about whatever you want with the listing like give people a choice of items, have one item to sell, have a million items to sell, but you get one listing to do it in. We intend to never use fees based on percentage of price and purely use flat fees.

Each item has a charge based on per day, but they are pre-charged for thirty days. If the listing is closed early, then you are credited for the days remaining before the listing renews with fractions of days rounded down. When that month ends and if the listing is still active, the listing will renew if there are funds in your account or close if there are no funds.

We could charge you once per day, but this makes your funds records horribly cluttered. For example, if you list 100 items, you would have each of those items getting notes in your funds history each day and your funds history would look awful and unreadable. That is why we do the pre-charging for 30 days because of two annoying options, it is much less annoying than the other.

In editing your listing, you can add an extra premium feature to your listing, like larger size, and then you will be charged for the additional days remaining of the thirty days before your listing renews, rounded up. You cannot remove it once added. And of course when it renews, you'll be charged again. You can still always close the listing.