By using the buttons, 99dresses makes their system more fragile than necessary, and excludes people who could help build the community. Consider that most people won't need more than a few dresses worth of buttons. So someone who has 300 dresses has no incentive to upload them all to the site. Someone else has already pointed out that dresses need to be able to come out of the pool. Again that doesn't happen if money can't come back out. I might not even get to choose a dress I want if I'm worried that I won't be able to trade it again. The flow of dresses in and out is restricted, and that's not a good thing for the company.
Why not allow people to exchange buttons back for money, just at a lower rate?
Why? When you receive a dress, it is set to a disabled state on the site (rendering it unavailable for others). I'm guessing a dress can be in this state indefinitely, if one desires to keep a dress forever.
> I might not even get to choose a dress I want if I'm worried that I won't be able to trade it again
When would this happen? Why would you not be able to trade it again?
It sounds like you're confused about the logistics in play. The system is effectively the same as any other buying and selling marketplace, but virtual currency is used in place of dollars.
You're assuming that the supply and demand of dresses is balanced, and in particular that any particular dress will always be in demand.
You're right - you can keep a dress forever and it's not on the website. That's not really what I mean by "out of the system". Dresses need to be able to come out of the system because they go out of style, or get too used, and nobody wants them again. If I'm trading dresses and then get stuck with one, in a way it's still "in the system" and clogging it up. I can't participate until I buy back in again.
On the other hand, I already can't really remember why I blamed the virtual currency for this particular problem, so you're right about that, too. This problem exists when you use dollars, too.
Yes, and if I upload 50 dresses and they are requested and I now have 5000 buttons, what do I do with them? The point here is just that the button system essentially shuts itself off from say 45 of my dresses because I have no reason to upload them and sit around with so many buttons.
Why not allow people to exchange buttons back for money, just at a lower rate?