Marketplace Launch: Single-Item Policy and New Listing Limits

Welcome & Info Introductions, Rules & Feedback
1
Summary

Your feed back is heard and appreciated. There will be no changes to how the market is being run currently. You can continue to make unlimited listings and unlimited items in a listing.

The changes will be opt-in only. Those who want to use the new features can use them.

Changes are ready to be rolled out.

Summary

Hello everyone,

First, a huge thank you to everyone who uses our Marketplace. Your participation has made it one of the most active and trusted places for tech enthusiasts in India to buy, sell, and trade. Our vision is to continue building on this foundation to create the best, most reliable, and easiest-to-use P2P marketplace in the country.

To get there, we need to evolve.

The Challenge of Multi-Item Listings

As our marketplace has grown, we’ve identified a few key challenges with the popular practice of listing multiple items in a single thread. While convenient for sellers, it creates significant problems for the health of the marketplace as a whole:

  • For Buyers: It makes finding specific items nearly impossible. Our powerful filtering tools (for price, category, etc.) are designed to work on a per-listing basis. When a single topic contains a dozen different components, these filters become ineffective, and buyers have to manually scroll through long threads.

  • For Sellers & The Feedback System: It makes tracking sales and feedback ambiguous. When a topic is marked as “SOLD,” it’s unclear which of the many items was sold. This also complicates our Trader Feedback system, as it’s difficult to tie a specific rating to a specific transaction within a multi-item thread.

  • For Platform Clarity: It leads to cluttered and hard-to-read listings, which can feel disorganized and hurt the professional image of our marketplace.

The Solution: One Item Per Listing

To solve these challenges and build a better platform for everyone, we will be implementing a “one item per listing” policy.

This change will take effect from September 30th, 2025. After this date, new topics will need to be created for each individual item you wish to sell.

Our Commitment to You: Let’s Build the Solution Together

We understand why many of you post multiple items in one thread—it’s convenient, especially when you have many items to sell and want to manage them all in one place. We recognize that simply enforcing this new rule without addressing the root cause would be an inconvenience.

So, here is our commitment to you: Before this rule comes into effect, we will build the tools you need to make listing single items just as easy, if not easier, than the current method.

And to do that, we need your feedback.

We Need Your Input!

You are the power users, the sellers, and the heart of this community. You know the current workflow better than anyone. Please help us understand your process so we can build the right tools for you.

Please share your thoughts on the following questions:

  1. What are the biggest reasons you currently list multiple items in a single thread? (e.g., speed of creation, ease of posting all photos at once, managing replies in one place?)

  2. What features or tools would make creating and managing individual listings faster and more convenient for you? For example:

    • The ability to create multiple listings in a “draft” mode and publish them all at once?

    • Listing “templates” you can save and reuse for similar items?

    • A dedicated “Seller Dashboard” to see and manage all your active listings from a single page?

  3. Are there any other challenges or frustrations in the current listing process that we could improve to make your life easier?

Your feedback will directly shape the tools we build over the next two months. We will be actively developing based on your suggestions throughout August and September, with the goal of rolling out these new UX enhancements before the September 30th cut-off.

That is not to say that we are sitting idle and waiting for feedback. To kickstart this evolution, reasearch is already well underway on a major platform upgrade.

By December 2025, you can expect to see the foundations of a completely revamped marketplace experience. We are focused on creating a true marketplace destination with vastly improved search and discovery, professional tools including a dedicated Seller Dashboard for easier management, and a redesigned, modern look for listings that makes your products shine.

Alongside these usability upgrades, we are also architecting a new framework for unparalleled trust and safety to further protect our community. Your feedback on the listing process is the crucial next step, helping us ensure that the new tools we roll out are perfectly tailored to your workflow.

Thank you for being a vital part of the TechEnclave community and for helping us build a better marketplace for everyone.

23 Likes
2

Thanks for putting effort into improving the tooling for the forum, appreciate the thought going into this. My one suggestion would be not to set this as a hard deadline. Once you roll out, let folks test drive it, provide feedback that can go into refining it and once it reaches a good point, consider enforcing this.

From my POV, it’s just the ease of listing and updating that’s driving me to do multi item listings. As well as for small items carrying low value, it’s just a hassle to create and manage multiple threads. I can understand this for larger value items though. Keeping track of which threads can be bumped is also a pain (kinda wish TE could allow for us to enable an automatic bumping option).

But, if we can get a different view (like an ebay/amazon like grid, image first) within discourse, might be great and help with discoverability.

Also want to know if this change is just for regular users or retailers or both?

1 Like
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Is it possible to create one listing with several sub listings (like a page and sub page). Seller can fill these 3 things for sub page (or an option to make this item a sub listing - a tick option will be better)

  • Name
  • Price
  • Status

Rest of the info like Location, reason for sale, etc can be in the main listing.

This will make it easier to filter for buyers. Easier to fill for sellers. Just a suggestion

6 Likes
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Change is quite good, but in some topics there are so many items, which will make it difficult for sellers to put in all seperate topics (at-least as an end-user for others its a business).
But cause of this changes, many small items will have to be omitted (i have noticed some topics were small cables are up for sale)

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One item per listing sounds good, as it clarifies what’s available and what’s sold, and mainly keeps the thread clean.

It would be nice if TE members can see the seller’s other threads as well. For example, if they’re selling a gamepad in one thread, it also shows their other sale threads like notification. Additionally, having two templates for single and bulk listings would be helpful. If a user selects bulk, it could generate drafts for multiple listings, making the process more efficient.

1 Like
6

Single Item Listings should significantly improve ease of use. Better way to locate items. It does add some overhead for the seller but listing templates should ease that part.

Some category wise heuristics will be great too and should be easier to implement with the above change, If you can track individual item sales. For example for a DDR4 SODIMM listing you could display “44 for successful user-to-user sales in the last 6 months” etc. Might not be a big thing for most people, but some may like reading it and realizing this is a fast moving item.

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Posting a single item per post will surely make it easier for members to find the required products and check prices without opening the details page. Also, when multiple similar products are included in a single post, it often becomes difficult to locate the image of the desired product.

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That’s why my postings as Sale threads are always single item postings. It’s better for everybody to find items and when giving feedback also. Just search and find and buy or sell and give feedback. That’s it.

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  1. What are the biggest reasons you currently list multiple items in a single thread? (e.g., speed of creation, ease of posting all photos at once, managing replies in one place?)
  • Time to listing is lower.
  • Ease of listing multiple items at once, following a table-like template for common attributes
  • Uploading images into one place
  • Updating/bumping with or without price updates in one place
  • Managing replies and interest checks in one place
  • Lack of better options to do all these
  1. What features or tools would make creating and managing individual listings faster and more convenient for you? For example:
    • The ability to create multiple listings in a “draft” mode and publish them all at once?
    • Listing “templates” you can save and reuse for similar items?
    • A dedicated “Seller Dashboard” to see and manage all your active listings from a single page?
  • Being able to create/manage multiple listings definitely helps but would also need IMHO ways to easily manage responses, interest checks and a way to bump (with or without price/updates or info updates) at once.
  • Templates would help for sure, even in the current state! Great way to enforce best practices as well.
  • Seller dashboard would also be helpful. Would also add that an image thumbnail in listing (as an optional display mode, if need be) would also help find/manage listings. Right now, I generally search for @username #topic-name to find my stuff quickly. Not sure if there is an easier way right now.
  1. Are there any other challenges or frustrations in the current listing process that we could improve to make your life easier?
  • Listings could use an image thumbnail next to them. Much easier to visually identify and checkout the item vs. having to open it.
  • For some items that are old or price is unsure, it’d be nice if there was some way to bid for it within TE. I’ve recently sold items marked low either because it was dead or partially working and I’ve gotten folks interested to buy at higher prices. Prolly helps the seller get a reasonable price?
  • Some way to find “similar listings” when viewing one listing (sort of helps find general pricing of items listed here). Helps buyer and seller.
  • I don’t know if this already exists but some option inside #classifieds listing to sort by “Created” instead of “Activity”?
  • Easier means to bump/auto bump for a set period. This might especially be important if you’re enforcing single listing per item cause I think it’d be annoying to have to bump threads separately or remember to do that. For some items, maybe if seller is fine with TE managing bumping, that’d be preferable.
3 Likes
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I have almost exclusively posted single item sale threads because it keeps it clean. That also meant usually waiting for items to be sold off as I didn’t want to bump more than 2-3 active ones at a time.

Not sure how feasible it is, but if there is a possibility of creating an index of available items for each user in the marketplace, either something like a signature or link to a profile page, that would probably make maintenance easier and also eliminate the need to bump multiple threads.

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I have an idea, but it involes lot of coding effort. Probably will take months to develop. I’ll post later.

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LOL.. I already have a roadmap that will take months to develop. So feel free to dump your thoughts on me. Might be aligned with my thoughts or might give me a new direction, or something in between.

1 Like
13

This would be much welcome. I already just sell single items just to avoid confusion for me :grin:.

There could be a threshold in price. Like say any product greater than an asking price of ₹1k should be listed individually. For products cheaper than that could be grouped in a single sale thread in the garage section. So that the “house cleaning” “spring cleaning” type of sales with several small items can be made possible with ease.

1 Like
14

Huge positive, if implemented

This is my primary concern

15

May I ask how this will be enforced via Discourse itself ? Otherwise it will be a moderation nightmare.

Also how will this play out for a scenario where someone looks to list a Desktop initially without splitting components but based on the responses decides to split and sell components individually later ? I have seen this happen for most of the desktop listings.

Moreover if this is decided for Classifieds then it needs to be extended to the Reseller category as well. After all, most of us here act as both buyers and sellers.

Now coming to the questions -

Speed, convenience and grouping similar items in one category. Why would I want to spend time and effort to create separate threads for low value items eg. one HDMI cable and one USB cable ?

Enforcing properly structured easy-to-use (more drop-downs) templates and a dedicated “Seller Dashboard” for both the Classifieds and Reseller sections.

Automatic bumping algorithm based on :-

  • The date/time of creation
  • Bumping rules
  • Only if it moves off the top 10/15 etc.
  • Optionally, a schedule set by the seller in the dashboard (eg. some may want to only do it weekly)

Manual bumping override should be available in the seller’s dashboard.

I would recommend keeping the Garage Sale section outside of this change to allow members to list low value items or items without prices (I also would suggest adding an optional minimum reserve price as well for that section).

Like others have stated, it would be good to do pilot testing before a full roll-out of this change.

16

I’ve always posted multi-item sale threads as it’s almost always clearing out a cupboard, drawer, unused items, etc. They’re easy to post, update, and bump. Bumping feels like a critical part, as it allows all items to get visibility at once. How would this be dealt with if single-item topics are enforced?

Let’s say I have 7-8 items. At present, I think there’s a 48-hour rule between bumping threads. If that remains, I’d have to wait for 2 weeks to bump the last item, and this would scale linearly as the number of items increases. Moreover, it would drastically reduce the exposure frequency of other items as well.

Alternatively, if the bumping rule between separate threads is removed, people with multiple items for sale would end up dominating the front page every now and then.

I don’t have a solution for this in mind yet, and I’m just throwing this out there for discussion. Although not ideal, I would probably adjust to managing multiple threads in terms of posting/management, but bumping is a concern I’m worried about.

1 Like
17

Don’t list all items on the same day; stagger based on how they get sold ? In any case, I see this one item per topic policy leading to reduction of multiple sale topics from the same user.

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Don’t get constrained by the current construct. Maybe we will not allow bumps at all. Maybe we will allow one bump for each topic every 2 weeks. Consider everything flexible.

19

Anyone reading, will have to read from top to bottom, to make any sense of this flowchart or my goobly-goo.

Either download the image, or wait for it to clear up. It’s large.

2 Likes
20

I think bulk posting can also solve this problem.

I don’t know whether it is feasible to implement or not but:

A seller can create a single post with multiple items.

Each item can be listed and explained as usual in the body of the post.

However, each item must also be listed (the name only) in a list following the body or before the body. Each item listing can have a sold/unsold marker which the seller can mark by themself.

Once the sold item is marked as such, while giving feedback, the buyer and seller can choose that item and that item can be marked closed in the list.

And when all the items in the list are sold and feedback are shared, the whole thread can be marked closed automatically.

The list can also allow easy search for the products if these lists are made searchable somehow.

Example

List on top of the thread.

The list (something like what @ibose called seller dashboard)
——————————————————

  1. Item 1 - sold - feedback shared - closed
  2. Item 2 - unsold
  3. Item 3 - sold - feedback pending

———————————————————
The usual sale thread

Explanation, price, reasons, etc.
———————————————————