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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

In your example, I tried bidding $20,000 (I really love the couch) and you asked me to come down to $1500. Is there a reason you're steering buyers towards a minimum price?

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Prevents people from making ridiculous offers, especially by mistake. We want buyers to come away from BidKat feeling just as good as the seller.

I think that's a good impulse, but completely refusing the bid seems misguided.

The current system seems like it favors predatory buyers over fair ones. If the seller undervalues their item, trying to start at a fair price will get rejected. I don't know how you selected the [500 1500] envelope on price, but it seems pretty narrow. Couldn't you just warn the bidder that their bid is way above the seller's expectations (or current maximum offer) and then confirm they want to pay that much?

We can definitely look into this if we see this happening a lot. This should be a relative edge case and only kicks in for more expensive items, but you are right that there are other options.

Is there any chance you can add in a way to remove obviously fake bids? If too many users abuse the system it could ruin the functionality of the virtual cat that haggles with potential buyers.

For instance, someone might do a real bid of $500 (let's call them bidder A), but if there's a fake bid of $2000, would the virtual cat try and make bidder A bid higher than $2000?

No, BidKat doesn't work like that. He works with each buyer individually to come up with the price that they find fair and that meets the sellers price requirements.

That's great. Works fine for me. Once again, congrats.

Hah I had the same question too.

A suggestion is for a short text field for comments, to differentiate tie-breakers for the seller maybe?

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