3 Tiers of PucaTrade Membership

Big changes are happening on PucaTrade this month. I know, I know. Finally, right? We’re almost ready to drop the “Beta” and unveil PucaTrade “Revised.” In my last post, I talked about the cool new features you can expect from Revised. Today, let’s take a look at the changes that are coming to PucaPro (our paid membership program). To give you the bad news before the good—we’re phasing out the deck manager (for now). My feeling is that this is a peripheral feature that would take an extraordinary amount of time and effort to do right. And PucaTrade is a trading website. We want to really nail the trade-oriented features before we offer support for deck management. We may bring this back one day, and when we do, we’ll be sure to give it our fullest attention, and make sure it’s done right. I know some of you may have used this feature for list prioritization (like Wish Lists, etc). We feel that Wish Lists are a key feature of the trading experience, so in addition to Have and Want lists, we’ll be offering a Wish List as well for the cards you want, but aren’t fully ready to trade for. 3 Tiers of PucaTrade Membership As you know, there’s currently 2 tiers of PucaTrade Membership; “Free” and “PucaPro.” When we launch Revised, there will be 3 tiers: Common, Uncommon, and Rare. Common The common level is (unsurprisingly) the free level. This tier is undergoing a huge facelift, and will be exactly 1 million times cooler. But I’m actually not here to hype the coolness right now. There are a couple things that are pretty radically different that I want to communicate to you guys. First off, the Send a Card page will no longer show only the cards you have that other people want and can afford. Now, the Send a Card page will show every card that anyone can afford. The reason we’re structuring it this way is to make the whole signup process easier for new members. Right now, there’s a ton of opacity to the trading process on PucaTrade. People are understandably dejected and confused when they sign up for PucaTrade and immediately go to the Send a Card page—only to find that it’s blank. The fact is, constructing a complete Have List takes time and is a barrier to entry. We want to live up to our promise that you can start trading on PucaTrade in 30 seconds. An important thing to note with this change is that Want Lists will have increased visibility now. Indeed, Want Lists will be publicly visible to other PucaTraders from your profile. That reminds me: you’ll also have customizable profiles now. In the beginning, they’ll be pretty basic. They’ll have support for Avatars, and some optional personal info like your Facebook and Twitter accounts, a text field for anything you wish to share with the world, and your Want Lists. But as we continue to develop some of the more mission-critical features on the site (and get feedback from you guys), we’ll take a closer look at the profile spaces and add the features you all want the most. Uncommon This will be the new PucaPro. Uncommon will be the least expensive paid tier, for the rate of $3.75 per month at the yearly rate (and $5 at the monthly rate). Existing Pro members will be grandfathered in at the current rate until their existing subscription ends. Among other features, PucaTraders at the Uncommon level will be able to trade Foils. By the end of October, our goal is to support Condition and Non-English cards for Uncommon members as well. It was a tough decision to limit the trade of foils to our Pro-Tier members; in my heart of hearts I want everyone to be able to trade foils (and every card, for that matter) for free, but what we realized is that we’re converting almost every existing Pro-feature to a free Common feature, and it was really important to me that you guys still feel like you’re getting great value out of the Uncommon Tier. I don’t doubt that there will come a time in the future when we fully develop the Uncommon Tier and feel that we’re offering $3.75 per month worth of fantastic value to our Uncommon members. At that time it may be appropriate to release Foils, Condition, and Non-English cards at the Common level. But for now, it’s critical that we recoup some of the costs of development for these new features, so that we can finance the development of even better ones. Rare We’re working on a 3rd tier with even more amazing features, but this post is getting a bit long, so I’ll save it for the next one. Until then, Happy Trading! -Eric Freytag Drive a Tranquil Bargain