A Showroom That Keeps Getting Better

StarShipDealers doesn't just compete on prices and fees — we build. Today, we're shipping one of our most significant updates to date: a complete overhaul of the seller creation experience, an industry-first automatic protection system against catalogue price surges, sharper buyer-side filtering tools, and a reinforced security layer for everyone on the platform.

The timing isn't random. With Drake DefenseCon Week confirmed for May 14–27 at Area 18, ArcCorp — and a wave of new ships expected to drop — we wanted the Showroom to be in the best possible shape before the traffic hits. New listings, new buyers, new sellers. The platform had to be ready. Here's what's new.

For Sellers — Less Time Listing, More Control Over Pricing

Product Creation V2 — From 2 Minutes to 10 Seconds

Creating a listing used to take around two minutes of manual input — title, description, specs, images, category, all filled in by hand. That changes today.

Auto mode pulls everything directly from the StarShipDealers catalogue: title, specs, description, and images — including a generated VS card for upgrades showing the source and target ship side by side. The whole process takes under 10 seconds. You pick the ship or upgrade, confirm, done.

Manual mode has also been redesigned from scratch. For sellers who want full control over every field, the new flow is clean and fast — under a minute from start to publish-ready. The title prefix (Standalone Ship, CCUed Ship, Upgrade, Paint) is now applied and managed automatically — no inconsistencies between listings, no manual formatting.

Both modes go through the same validation pipeline. Quality stays consistent regardless of how a listing was created.

Auto-Pause on Catalogue Price Surges — An Industry First

This one solves a real problem that has affected every grey market platform, and that until now nobody had addressed properly.

Here's what used to happen. A seller lists a Cutlass Red → Hull B upgrade for $10. Standard price, reasonable margin. Then CIG raises the Hull B from $140 to $280 in the RSI store. That upgrade — which was worth maybe $5 on the grey market a few hours ago — is now worth $145 or more. The listing is still up at $10. Buyers notice before the seller does. They rush to buy. Three, four, five purchases go through before anyone catches it. The platform eventually cancels the orders, refunds the buyers, and the seller is left with cancelled transactions, frustrated buyers, and wasted time. No one wins.

StarShipDealers now handles this automatically. When our system detects a catalogue price surge of 10% or more on a ship model, every affected listing is immediately paused. No manual intervention needed, no window of exposure.

  • Sellers receive a notification with the affected listings and the reason
  • To reactivate, sellers set their listing back to pending — the platform handles the rest
  • For listings created via Auto mode, revalidation is instantaneous: the system already has all the data it needs
  • For manually created listings, the normal validation flow applies

This is the kind of infrastructure that separates a professional marketplace from a listing board. We built it because our sellers asked for it — and because no one else had.

For Buyers — A Sharper Way to Find What You Need

Redesigned Filtering & Search Tools

What ships today is a significant improvement to how you navigate and filter the catalogue. Filters now apply instantly as you select them, no submit button needed. The filter panel works properly on mobile for the first time — cards stack cleanly, pills don't overflow, the drawer behaves itself below 1400px. If you've been browsing StarShipDealers on your phone and fighting the layout, that's fixed.

The filter set itself has been expanded to match CIG's updated ship classification system. Ship specialties — the roles and operational profiles CIG has been refining — are now surfaced as filter options. You can now narrow down by what a ship actually does, not just by name or manufacturer.

A new Melt Price filter has also been added. For buyers who evaluate purchases against RSI store credit value, you can now filter and sort directly by melt price — no more manual calculation.

Better Listings, Faster Decisions

One of the quieter benefits of our seller-side overhaul (more on that below) is that listings created through the new system are better structured from day one. Consistent titles, accurate specs, standardized images. When every listing follows the same format, finding what you're looking for takes less time — and comparing options becomes straightforward. Expect the catalogue quality to improve steadily as sellers create new listings through the updated flow.

Cleaner URLs — Share, Bookmark, Discover

Every ship, upgrade, and paint page on StarShipDealers now has a clean, readable URL. Instead of a parameter string, you get something like /market/ships/hull-b/ or /market/upgrades/from/cutlass-red/to/hull-b/. Three concrete benefits:

  • Easier sharing — a link you send to a friend or post on Discord actually reads like something
  • Better bookmarks — URLs are stable, human-readable, and won't break between sessions
  • More visibility on Google — structured URLs are one of the clearest SEO signals. Ship and upgrade pages will index and rank better, which means more organic discovery of listings you're looking for

For Everyone — Reinforced Security

Security improvements shipped across the board in this update, affecting both buyers and sellers.

  • Device & country change notifications — if your account is accessed from a new device or a new country, you'll be notified immediately. Standard practice for any platform handling real-money transactions.
  • Anti-bot & anti-abuse protection — automated systems now detect and respond to bot-like behaviour on the platform. Accounts triggering abuse patterns are handled automatically, before they can impact the buyer or seller experience.
  • Reinforced internal security — multiple layers of platform security have been audited and hardened, covering both public-facing features and internal admin tooling.

StarShipDealers handles real transactions between real people. Security isn't a checkbox — it's infrastructure, and we treat it that way.

What's Coming Next

In the meantime, the next twenty days are going to be busy. Drake DefenseCon Week runs May 14–27, and CIG has already confirmed the event at Area 18, ArcCorp. Our SC Watch system is tracking every Comm-Link and official announcement as they land — the Drake Ironclad, the Ironclad Assault, and several other ships are expected to go flight-ready during the event. When the announcements drop, listings will be live on StarShipDealers fast.

We're not just watching from the sidelines. We're making sure the Showroom is ready.

Browse the StarShipDealers Showroom

Clear skies and safe jumps, Citizen! 🚀