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Having a disinterested party set the prices seems unlikely to work (sustainably/scale-ably). A bid/ask system (like the stock market) seems like a decent model,
by tesseract 17y ago
Having a disinterested party set the prices seems unlikely to work (sustainably/scale-ably). A bid/ask system (like the stock market) seems like a decent model, although it might be difficult to present in a way that is easy for most users to understand.
Just like in the real markets there would room for a market-maker to make money on the bid-ask spread, while providing liquidity... if the service had an API, this could be a third party, although the more obvious scenario is that CardPool itself would be the market maker.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoNone of the parties is disinterested. If I purchase £50 GBP giftcard, then my friend wants to swap that in for 80% of the value, they get £40 to spend elsewhere. Now if CardPool sell the card back to the company for £45 they're both splitting the remaining £10. CardPool don't need the customer buyers in order to buy cards. They could presumably also deal with the companies to buy cards direct at a discount (as if they were an affiliate). CardPool then have a few options. If they lower the swap value of company A then I'm more likely to use my money there. This can actually be bad for company A as whilst they can negotiate a potentially larger amount of the difference of a buy-back they also risk the customer keeping the card and actually using it. Which is a transactional loss for them but a potential win if they can gain repeat custom. It's really quite interesting to consider the back room deals that might go on over this.