Badge Store Batch Purchase

[aBiSh]

So I recently had issues with badges because I purchased a whole batch of them without realizing that most of them can not be re-gifted. I'm so thankful to CheatAreZee for graciously fixing this for us. He's such a delight!

After learning my lesson, I bought two more, correctly this time but found flaws on the existing system.

You have to purchase one badge at a time. For example, if you want to award 3 Helpful Member badges to 3 different people, if I'm not missing anything, you have to go to each of their profiles, click Gift, visit Badge Store, shop as that user, add to cart and continue to payment. Tedious work for me is manageable. I just don't like the fact that it would reflect as three different transactions on my credit card history with three different conversion rates and offshore service margins because I'm not in US.

1. I wonder if there is a way to batch purchase badges. I'm imagining a table where you can select a badge, select the user you want to give it to, a text box for a message, and you can keep adding more lines. This way it would only reflect once on your payment.

2. Also, it would really be great if there is a custom award badge. I understand that there is an award system plugin that exists out there but it's just a hassle having to collect images for awards and build it, where as ProBoards already have it. All they need is a custom award system that selects the blank image, puts the text for the name of the award, and voila!

Not sure how feasible this is to our developers but I hope they put it on their list somehow. It would be really good for marketing and income generation, for sure. 

[Ryan Roos]

We already have plans for improving the badge system in the future.

Currently we are limited by our checkout technology. The system simply doesn't work in the way you are requesting. That being said many badges are labeled as regiftable (look for the present icon). You can purchase those badges in bulk the way you desire and then gift them out as you see fit. In any case you would always have to manually select each individual user, it's just a matter of before the transaction or after it.

We already have your first idea in our notes for future improvements. But that being said this is a microtransaction system. Just like a game on Facebook or items in a phone app you may have there are going to be many small purchases. That's how microtransactions work. We would love nothing more than to have people bulk purchase. But that being said this isn't behavior that will be common. It's going to be rare that someone buys 20 badges for 20 users all at once. It's far more common for people to buy one badge for one user and then a different one for another (especially as the library of badges grows). We made checkout faster after the first time you do it for that exact reason.

With launch happening so soon we don't have time to add extra convenience features to the checkout. You can currently accomplish any purchase already, albeit at a slower pace than you may desire if you're bulk buying. When we have time after launch we will come back to this and make the improvements that we can.

With regards to your second idea, for now we are going to keep the badges ProBoards only. The badges are a paid feature and forum admin should not be altering them with their own custom badges. The system needs to maintain balance and order for now. And we don't want people seeing badges they cannot purchase themselves. There are already multiple planned upgrades for the badges and how they are earned. Once we completed those things we can reexamine ideas like the one you proposed.

Thank you.

[aBiSh]

Thank you for this explanation Ryan Roos.

With all due respect, I don't agree with you that "it's going to be rare that someone buys 20 badges for 20 users all at once" since most of your members here are forum admins and moderators and I'm sure it wasn't only me who had this idea.

However, I'm glad to hear from you that:

1. Batch purchase is already in your notes for future improvements
2. There are already multiple planned upgrades for the badges and how they are earned

Will be looking forward to these developments. Thank you again.

[Ryan Roos]

Like I said, when we have time to improve things we will.

Just a side note. Looking through the entire transaction log since January 16th you and only one other person have ever purchased more than 4 badges at a single time. That's in the hundreds of members so far. I'm not saying you're wrong. You prove that people will want to do it. I'm just saying that it isn't something we're witnessing even though it's already possible with the regiftable badges (the ones designed to be presents). It absolutely something we should support. But hopefully you can see that it isn't a priority right now with all that we have to do for launch. It really isn't something we are witnessing members are doing en masse. Less than 0.5% so far have bought 2 or more badges at once. It's entirely possible that's because we don't make it easy to do so. But trust me, there's nothing we want more than to make it easy for people to get badges.