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Would a rating system work to get feedback on equipment prices?

Casey Hoy's picture
Fri, 06/13/2008 - 15:48 — Casey Hoy

At the recent value-added dairy processing group meeting, a request was made for an anonymous way to compare used equipment prices. Small-scale processing equipment apparently can be difficult to come by and once found it's hard to know what a reasonable or going price is because so few sales are being made. Our site administrator is working on adding a rating tool to the site for things like proposals and ideas, much like the 1 to 5 star ratings that you are asked to give on travel websites. ...

Once this feature becomes available, a member of this group could post a description and asking price for a piece of used equipment (the source needn't be mentioned) that they're not sure about. Then the rest of the group could rate the price from 1 - good deal!, to 3 - sounds about right, to 5 - rip-off! Would that work? Would the group contribute the ratings and check prices of used equipment this way? If they did would it help with finding fair prices for used equipment?

Posted messages to which this one leads
Poll: voting for, or against a number of choices: Would you like to see the creation of a new site for evaluating/rating market prices for specialty food processing equipment

Comments

Fri, 06/20/2008 - 09:04 — Brian Schlatter
Brian Schlatter's picture

A rating system would really

A rating system would really help out when looking at buying equipment. For those who have already bought equipment it would be nice to help the ones looking for equipment by letting them know how much and what it was like.

Brian Schlatter

Canal Junction Farmstead Cheese

Fri, 06/20/2008 - 09:38 — Sam Rose
Sam Rose's picture

A rating system would be

A rating system would be pretty darn easy to put into place.

 

I'd like to offer 2 possibilities:

 

  1.  The price comparison system could become part of this site. It could a special "group" with a special link to the group, and a special type of "post" being added to it that is a listing for a piece of equipment. The rating based on price would then be part of this equipment listing reference. It can also be possible to add the equipment listing from a link that is in your web browser tool bar. And, in cases where sites output RSS feeds (provided they give us permission to re-publish) we could also import RSS feeds based on certain filters, and rate those. This could also be useful for rating services, too. Anything that is currently problematic for local food producers and processors. A "market intelligence" system.
  2. We could do all of the above, but on a seperate partner site, that could share login info etc with this site. This option is actually much better from a software point of view, because some of these funcitons, like ratings have a "site-wide" limitation. Plus, this would help keep this space focused. And, there are provisions in Drupal to turn the code for one site into multiple sites very easily. The "multi-site" function was made precisely for this reason. Yet, the new site can have a different look and feel.

I'd like to propose that #2 would be the best way to get this up and running as quickly as possible. I'll create a poll and if folks agree, then I'll have this in place by next week. We'll start out simple:

  • just a way to create a listing that links back to it's source
  • a fivestar rating system for the listing
  • a "dashboard" style page that will show which listings are new, which ones have risen to the top in ratings

We can refine from there based on your feedback as the actual users of the site (or based on your initial feedback to this post). In a new iteration, I'll introduce the "bookmarking" from your web browser to make it easier to add a listing from any web page you are looking at right to the site.

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