Commercial sales subforum

[Mux213]

Time to post some more info here, its been awhile since Banpei put up the original post with basic rules.

First of, we've been asked a few times why we've made the Commercial Sales section in the first place. So lets quickly answer that question.

Most bulletin boards do not allow commercial activity on their board. They allow members to post wanted and for sale adds in a subforum for that purpose but these are almost always restricted to personal items only. This is mainly done to ensure there is no conflict of interest and to make sure the forum does not get into trouble if a commercial seller turns out to be a fraud or in any other way does not meet a buyers expectations. Also there are problems with a businesses need to advertise their products and with allowing businesses on a forum often a problem arises that a forum gets filled with advertisement related posts. Someone posts a question, a seller immediatly replies with a remark that will hint to selling his product. Different sellers selling the same product could get into competition within the forum, etc.

Bottom line, alot of forums on the net simply choose not to allow any commercial exploitation and thats the end of that.

When we started this board we had the same rules. No posts in the sales section for businesses, no commercial related posts within the forum anywhere, the only hint you where allowed to give that you run a business was in your signature.

We are however a community where there is a high demand for (aftermarket) parts, we're all driving 20+ year old cars that need regular maintenance and have wishes for upgrades. Many threads already existed on the board related to shops that were out there so we could find our way around but there really seemed to be a need out there for some form of interactivity between the shops and our members. We got approach by several business about a way to sell their products and what was allowed on our board and what wasn't.

Eventually we figured there had to be a way that we could fill this gap on our board and allow commercial activity without compromising the integrity of our board. Looking at other car forums we noticed that others had dealt with the same issue we had and basically did the same we desided to do.

We desided to create a separete sub forum in which only business members are allowed to start threads to advertise their products. They have a relative freedom in the way they choose to do this in their own threads. We don't give restrictions on this, for all we care you can run an intire shop within a thread in this subforum. Aslong as you keep things fair. (so posting 1000 threads so everybody else's threads disappears is out of the question, also filling up your competitors threads with gunk or flaming is not allowed, that sorta thing).
The tradeoff is that business members are ONLY allowed to advertise their products in the commercial section of the site. No business sales posts are allowed in the normal sales section (if you chose not to participate in the commercial sales section, you chose not to advertise on our board) and you are not allowed to advertise your products in any other thread on the board (but that goes for any member).