Buy / Sell Guidelines

GIRS BUY/SELL FORUM GUIDELINES (updated 2/22/2010)
Use of the GIRS Buy/Sell forums is indicative to your acceptance of the below guidelines.
The Greater Iowa Reef Society (GIRS) has created the buy/sell/trade forums
to allow all members to buy, sell or trade livestock, equipment and dry
goods between members.  This forum is not intended for commercial
sellers.  Wonder if you’re a commercial seller?  See the Commercial
Sellers section at the end of these guidelines to determine if you meet
the commercial seller criteria.
In order to provide a positive experience, the following guidelines have been created:
Most Important Guideline
All
buying, selling, and trading activity should be done with integrity and
mutual respect.  This is by far, the most important guideline of all.
Sellers
[list type=decimal][*]Please specify your location.  If you don’t, it’s sure to be the first question that’s asked.[*]Items listed in this forum are to be reef related – selling or
trading non-reef related items  should be listed in the off topic forum.[*]An asking price or trade expectations should be listed in the post.[*]If you are willing to ship, please specify costs (approximate is fine
for doing so in your listing. If you are not willing to ship, please
indicate so.[*]It is permitted to post a link to someone else’s
for sale ad on another site as a courtesy to the GIRS members (except
if that seller meets the classification of a commercial seller).   If
you do so, please clearly indicate that it’s not your item and that
you’re just posting a link as a courtesy.[*]Please try to
include as many details about your item(s) as possible such as age,
condition, usage history, repair history, location, defects, pictures,
etc.   A picture is worth a thousand words![*]Selling items that are illegal to own is strictly forbidden.[*]Once an agreement has been made:[list type=decimal][*]Please indicate that the item is pending sale.[*]The seller should give reasonable expectations for a time to pickup. 
If these expectations are not met, the item can be put up for sale
again.[*]The seller should not take offers from others for more money (just like buyers should not offer).[*]In some situations, it’s necessary to sell items very quickly and
waiting for pickup is not practical.  These are the sales where the
first person to put cash in your hand for an item is the one that gets
it.  These sales should be clearly marked "CASH IN HAND SALE”.  In
these cases, holding the item for out of town buyers is at the sellers
discretion.  Properly labeling the sale will help to prevent
miscommunications.[*]It’s strongly encouraged to honor the “fist
come, first served” approach to offers for purchase.  Honor the offers
in the order they were received.[*]Selling to someone is done at
the discretion of the seller.  If there's a good reason not to sell to
someone, they don’t have to.  This should not be exploited to show
preference to friends.  If you want to show preference to your friends,
offer the item for sale privately to them before posting it on forum.[/list type=decimal]Buyers
[*]This forum is for buying/selling or trading – it is not intended for
discussion or feedback or your opinion about a product that’s being
sold. If you wish to make a negative comment on the quality of someone
else's trade item or the price with no intention of buying or trading
please keep those thoughts to yourself.[*]If you would like to
negotiate a “deal”, either with pricing, partial trades or other
details please handle this using the Private Message system unless the
seller has explicitly requested that all negotiations be handled on the
original post.[*]If there are other details missing from the
post that would help you and others decide, please feel free to post
asking for additional or specific details.[/list type=decimal]Mind your netiquette
Netiquette is the rules of communicating online.  If you're not familiar with what this is, there's a nice online book available at http://www.albion.com/netiquette/index.html.  We won't hold you to everything, but the major stuff like not typing in all caps, flaming, etc. may get you a PM from an Admin requesting that you adjust your posting.
Use at your own risk
While
most members have found the Buy/Sell forum an incredible resource for
finding great deals, I must stress that you use it at your own risk. 
GIRS, it's officers and anyone not actively participating as either a
buyer or a seller cannot be held responsible for any problems that may
arise as a part of a transaction.  While we  would like to know about
cases where major misrepresentation or fraud has occurred, we will not
be able to provide any assistance or recourse in resolving the issue.
Commercial Sellers
How can you tell if you're a "commercial" level seller?
[list type=decimal][*]Are more than 15% of your posts related to the sale of a product that
you are responsible for either delivering, growing or otherwise
manufacturing?[*]Do you sell your products under a business name
or file taxes for the business that's responsible for delivering,
growing or otherwise manufacturing the items you're selling?[*]Are you publicly offering a service at a price?[/list type=decimal]If
you can answer "YES" to any one of these three questions, you're
classified as a commercial seller.  For commercial sellers to post
items for sale, go to this URL
(http://www.greateriowareefsociety.org/?tabid=105) to find out about
becoming a sponsor.  Sponsors get access to the Commercial Members
& Club Sponsors forum and are not limited to the number of for sale
posts they wish to make.

In summary...
As this is an
open forum, we are relying on the honor system to help encourage fair
trading. It is not the role of GIRS to enforce transactions.  In cases
where it’s brought to the board attention that blatant fraud is taking
place, action deemed appropriate can and likely will be taken by the
board.  Then can include a temporary or permanent ban from the site,
and depending on the severity of the situation, a revocation of
membership.

 

Yeah, that's addressed in the rest of the guidelines that's being reviewed by the BoD now.

--AJ

 

Fawn,
Good question. No, you would not at all be considered commercial, nor would any of the other coral sellers on this site that I can think of. In the case of selling corals, you're offering a product, not a service. A service would be something like a weekly tank maintenance service or a service to set up your tank, etc. Keep in mind Fawn, this is really targeted to keeping the buy/sell forum for hobbyists.

Thanks for asking for clarification. Let me know if you have any other questions.

--AJ

 

We have no interest in tracking this as an exact science.  If it looks like it's an overwhelming majority of selling vs posting, for a given individual, we'll address it accordingly.  I think Kirklins are a great example.  They breed clownfish, but they are also very active in the club, and post much more than just trying to sell their fish.  If they were just on the site to breed their clownfish and sell them, that would be fine, but we would ask them to become a sponsor (which for the record, just means they pay an extra $20 a year and post in the sponsor forum instead of the buy/sell forum).
--AJ

 

Ha!  Yeah, it's because of RC that we have chosen not to set a minimum post amount before a person can see/post in the Buy/Sell forums...and just to be clear, I don't have an issue with the sellers on RC being forced to have a 50 post minimum, what I had a problem with is forcing buyers to have a minimum post count.  A noob wouldn't be able to go out and get deals on used stuff until they got 50 posts...just doesn't seem fair to me....but that's RC, not GIRS.  If problems continue, we may have to implement something like that, but the step that we've chosen to first implement to address this issue are these guidelines.  I'm hoping that having these guidelines out here will be enough to get rid of most/all of the issues...or at least have a reason to point back to when we need to take action on something.
And you're right, the member BST forum is not being used to it's full potential.
--AJ