Buy Orders

[johnc]

Post any feedback or questions about buy orders here.

Edit: Buy Orders are now active for all items!

[aj]

Question:
If there are buy orders for a commodity item and the stock of the item for sale drops to 0, do the buy orders remain? If so, is the market page for that item still available? (Currently, when an item has no avialable stock, there is no past sales information available, nothing at all about the item shows up, not even an image.)

[Loktai]

aj: The buy orders -should- remain, and the market should stay available, but we'll have to see how Valve has implemented it.

[tirpider]

It means I have to have idle money sitting around in my wallet while waiting for orders to go through.

Too much trouble for stickers on my profile page.

[johnc]

aj: yes the buy orders will remain for that item. You'll see the buy order as active on the front page of the market; however the listing page for the item won't show anything (it currently needs at least one item for sale to show anything). We'll get that fixed at some point, probably after the Summer Sale is over.

[ramrodwilly]

Social Commander, just to clarify, the reason your $0.10 won't affect the median sale price is because the median is what's called a "robust" measure. In other words, it is very resistant to extreme values, such as your one $0.10 card compared to thousands of $0.19 cards. In contrast, the arithmetic mean isn't robust and is easily influenced by extreme values. That's not always a bad thing, but it usually is when you want to inform consumers of prices.

For example, take these five house prices: $300k, $350k, $375k, $400k, and $1200k. The median price is $375k and the mean price is $525k. If someone asked you what the average house price was, the $375k median price would be closer to the price of most of the houses. On a side note, that's why you should never trust real estate agents that only quote mean prices.

As a general rule of thumb, the median is the better measure to use for listing prices, such as on the Steam Market. This is because the median has a higher "breakdown point" than the mean. Skipping the math, the median has a breakdown point of [(n-1) / (2n)], or asymptotically 0.5, so half of the Steam Market listings would need to be extreme for the median to be badly affected (i.e. seeing large spikes on the chart). By contrast, the mean has a breakdown point of (1 / n), or asymptotically 0, so only one Steam Market listing would need to be extreme for the mean to be badly affected. If Valve used mean sale price, the charts would likely be all over the place from lowballers and other extreme values, such as your $0.10 card. That's why Valve uses the median sale prices--to make it easier for us to list items at prices that are likely to sell.

[-||cherohala||-]

Originally posted by tirpider:

It means I have to have idle money sitting around in my wallet while waiting for orders to go through.

Too much trouble for stickers on my profile page.

If the money is burning a hole in the pocket, can always just bid higher. For both half life and summer cards, if I didn't want to wait I'd just bid a bit higher and have them within a few minutes at the longest. Sometimes that can net you a few cheap ones if you were lucky with timing too.

[tirpider]

How old is the average Steam sticker/badge/card buyer again?
I find it hard to swallow that this is all targeted at children.

[Social Commander]

Originally posted by ramrodwilly:

Social Commander, just to clarify...

Thx! :D

[Loktai]

Originally posted by tirpider:

How old is the average Steam sticker/badge/card buyer again?
I find it hard to swallow that this is all targeted at children.

Offhand? I'd guess early-mid 20s.

[swerve]

Preferred it how it was. This system seems so convaluted.

I know you are trying to make it easier to buy and sell without having to sit in front of a computer alll day, but this is really not that good of a system. It was so much easier to buy and sell already, it was good to see who was selling.

Please revert, or fix this system.

[Neostorm_X]

i listed a buy order to buy some steam community cards
but i did it on the wrong card
but why did it not give my money back when i canceled the order?

[mike cesara]

Personally I am not supporting 'traders' as they many on every forum offering 1 card for 2. I have no choice now. Seems like market was intended for wholesale traders, I'd rather stop using it. One step forward, two steps back.

[aj]

I noticed there is a ticker now that shows recent activity (listings, cancelations, sales, buy orders) in a vertical scroll. It shows a limited amount of activity occurring on a particular item since the page was opened.
It might be more useful with a little more activity shown.
In addition, it might be nice, if possible, to pull the last few transactions in so it is not blank on the market page for slower items. "Waiting for activity..." gets pretty boring every time you open a new item page.

[aj]

Originally posted by THE KUNFU FIGHTER:

i listed a buy order to buy some steam community cards
but i did it on the wrong card
but why did it not give my money back when i canceled the order?

Because if you canceled the order it never took your money in the first place.

Money doesn't leave or enter your Steam wallet until an actual transaction is made.

[Cool Doge]

Screw this system. I know Valve build this to help buyers get item in the price they want. But some buyers want to choose the sellers. And what is worst that I want to buy item right now and there a ton of items out there. And got struck everytime they sold out. I like the old way where I click click click till I get all I need.