It can be slightly depressing when you distill months of hard work down to just a few paragraphs of release notes. But often with software design and development, that means that you’re doing it right. The simplest functionality for users can be the most complicated to build right. Team Infinite Armory just pushed one of the largest updates out to the app yet, and it’s centered around a few specific pieces of functionality:
- Offers
- Transactions
- Feedback
This entire update started with one simple goal: Seller Feedback. A seller’s ability to build a reputation on IA is crucial to the app’s success for obvious reasons. Building the feedback system the right way requires forethought and significant work. For feedback to be trustworthy, it needs to be based on verified transactions. So we had to build that. And for verified transactions to work right, there really needs to be an offer system, so we built that too. And for all of this to seamlessly work as a flow, there needs to be good email notifications. So we built that too.
Feedback isn’t as bulletproof as we want just yet, but this is a great start. Fighting fraud is a never ending battle with marketplaces. We have more solutions coming in order to mitigate that risk even further, but this update gives us a good foundation. Bonus points that it makes the app far more useable.
So without further ado, here’s the entire list of what’s new with this update:
- Ability to send a vendor an offer for a listing
- Ability for vendors to respond to offers
- Payment address support for selected payment methods (only sent to verified buyers)
- Shipping address support for non-FFL transactions
- Tracking number support for shipped orders, with auto-detection of carrier for UPS, FedEx, and USPS
- Vendor feedback system
- Account pages to manage offers sent and offers received
- Offers page on each individual listing to manage offers for a single listing
- Account pages to manage sales and purchases
- HTML emails for all offer, transaction, shipping, and feedback functionality
We also included a few other improvements not related to offers, transactions, and feedback:
- A new, updated main user menu that includes:
- All new design!
- New sections for clearer menu organization
- Improved mobile layout
- Updated notification badge system that includes badge from each relevant account page
- User’s profile picture displayed in the navigation bar
- Updated verified badge appearance and display on most pages it was missing
- Moved “Set Search Alert” button out of the filter pop-up and into the search bar for better discoverability
- Updated to a more reliable email sender tool so that emails should appear in spam less than before
This was easily the most significant functionality upgrade to Infinite Armory we’ve done since we first went live. There undoubtedly will be a few bugs, so if you see any, please let us know! Up next we’re going to focus on some key UX and design improvements as well as getting prepared for the public launch!
NOTE for current users: Because of the way we needed to build in the updated payment address support, vendors who had previously selected payment methods will need to go in and select them again, we were not able to migrate them. The site should force you to do this before you add your next listing, but it would be good to go into your settings and fill it out proactively.