What's New, What's Next: Early June Edition

Oh and another thing! WTG with the Bonanzle block party on Sunday! You guys beat the previous record for items sold in a day by like 20%!

I like this idea! One of the things that I don’t like about the OBO option is that it can take a couple of days communicating. This can speed up a sell.

Great Additions Bill! I am really looking forward to the new features that are in the works!

Great changes. Love the idea of the search order and the suggestions on imported listings. Can’t wait to see the next round. Thanks.

It is easy to be a passionate seller when selling on a site that is run by the best….Thanks to all the Boyz (and gurlz ??) that make it happen…..

Thanks for all the improvements. It just keeps getting better and better!

I am so happy to be here and grow with Bonanzle. Thank YOU!

I have to agree with steen1…sorry Bill….
I also think that the “shipping issue” should be fixed before these ideas are implmented….International sellers are already at a disadvantage ..now this … I guess we will be in the outfield

soooo excitng!!!! very very happy to be a part of the bonanzle family

Very interesting!

I’m glad to see the outdated descriptions being addressed.

As a Canadian seller, I too, would like to see the international shipping/search thingie fixed up. The shipping profiles don’t work for us, as they’re aimed at US sellers.

When we search for stuff, it’s defaulted to a checkbox that a new buyer wouldn’t notice, ‘ships to Canada’. I sell worldwide, and have shipping costs in every single listing, as well as a custom cat right at the top of my list, telling buyers I ship worldwide and combine shipping. But, if they don’t see my stuff because of the way shipping is set up, then I get no/few sales.

Oh, and since I’m here, thanks for making the bmails more readily accepted. I am, however, finding people are not reading my bmails, and are ending up not paying, possibly thinking I’m an unresponsive seller. I have one just today – accepted my counteroffer, yet didn’t read the email I sent him on Saturday regarding payment options. If he never sees it, he won’t pay, and I’ll have yet another NPB.

Brenda
ps – Bill, love your sense of humour.

We also have concerns about having to be online 24/7. We wish we could be exclusively on Bonanzle, but we cannot at this time. There was no advantage for sales when we DID subscribe. Now people who pay fees will be advantaged?

We love this place and want more than anything for it to succeed. We love and respect Bill and the team for opening up this opportunity. But, the answer for us cannot be selling everything for low prices. That was eBay’s model. We had to make the unhappy decision to drop subscriptions because sales weren’t paying for the fees. And we hated the eBay model where we were buried in visibility.

That being said, we are STILL here for the long run. We just don’t have that happy large circle of friends and family to blog, tweet, twitter, etc.

Thanks for your changes, some of them seem great. But being online 24/7 is awful for us because we are not able to be here as our only selling venue. That is asking us to be Brick & Mortar style selling with the store staff always at the counter. I check Bonanzle a dozen times a day, but cannot live on the sales we have received, and those sales were when we paid fees. Check our history if you want to see more detail.

Hey all,

I bring answers for your questions.

“What will stop a person from leaving their browser open but not being online?” If you’re logged in, the site automatically assumes you’ve left if you haven’t moved in 15 minutes. If you’re connected via remote chat and someone messages you and we can’t get to your IM client, we then mark you as not online. Soon we’ll also close the last gap, if you have setup your IM client, and its online, but you don’t respond, we’ll also presume you offline.

“Does free shipping effect search status or search placement?” No.

“Do I have to keep 5 browser windows open if I have five booths?” No, you can setup all five booths to tie to the same messaging client, so you can just be available over IM.

“Will it be bad for non-OBO sellers?” I think not. Much of the time, a buyer just wants to ask the seller a couple quick questions about shipping or such, just to feel confident the seller is a real person. A seller is never obligated to accept outrageous offers.

“How will it affect premiere memberships?” Currently the premiere items are using the same weighting algorithm as the main items, that is, they’ll have greater precedence if the seller is online. We may re-evaluate that in the future. Regardless, all premiere items will still show up, it will just be a matter of ordering.

“What are we doing in terms of press releases?” We’ve designated May and June to be “development months” where we’re focusing on perfecting our feature set more than getting media attention. We’re still talking with press occasionally, but we expect to start making more of an active effort of it again in July. In the early parts of this year, we spent significant portions of time on press releases and media outreach, and it worked well for us.

“Sucks to your search ordering. Where’s the shipping calculator?” It’s coming. But much like better support for internationalization, perfecting details like these do not set Bonanzle apart from a buyers standpoint, so to spend weeks working on them (and in the case of the shipping calculator, it is real hard…) before we have built an experience that is uniquely memorable to buyers is to set our ceiling right where the existing eBay alternatives are, and we aspire to more. We want an experience that is memorable and differentiated, which we think is provided by real time interactions. As we continue to establish that experience, then I think we can more strategically spend time on building out some of the niceties like multiple shipping options. (And specifically, how to add multiple shipping options without cluttering our interface, which is sure to be a challenge)

Don’t want to make this post a gajillion characters long, so I’ll stop there, but hopefully this clears up some of the more common questions. See also my previous post in the thread, which Reen kindly reposted above.

Some of Bill’s answers to questions asked concerning the new features

I also agree with others that tying the search visibility, so the visibility of my items, with me being online is an impossible task for most sellers and will drive me away from here.

Leaving a browser open on Bonanzle’s page here is no option if I am absent like sleeping or a day on vacation etc. It also gives a false picture to a buyer and will cause disappointments if seller is not truly present. Learn from Ebay, which is doing away with its Skype (which is comparable). ‘Live’ communication does not work on the Internet, unless it is attached to a ‘live’ event of limited duration like a ‘live auction’, ‘open house’, ‘conference’ etc. Trying to emulate a bricks and mortar store’s ‘liveness’ makes the ‘Internet store’ non-viable due to the added cost. An Internet store thrives from its ‘non liveness’ which offers buyers ‘lower cost items’ than at B+M’s, exactly BECAUSE it is sold ‘non live’.

I am a small seller and cannot afford the extra cost of having someone continuously online. If I would be required to do so, I would have to slap on an extra large margin on my prices to cover the cost and that would price me too high to compete with other sites. It will also price Bonanzle out of existence. You have mostly good ideas, but this is a really bad idea.

In general any idea that takes away teh control of a seller on his visibility, is a bad idea. Buyers shoudl not have the primary control of a seller’s visibility. If they do, it is in fact a way to give a byer control over a seller’s operations and therefore his costs. That in turn mean that someone who s totally ignorant about a seller’s costs, will drive those costs up. It is a form of increasing cost intransparency for a buyer. True improvements on a site should increase ‘cost transparency’ to a buyer, not the reverse. That way buyers are empowered to buy most efficiently, so get the best deal.

What I would love to see as ‘improvement’ is an actual follow up on the many new ‘content’ additions to existing item traits which I have suggested. This ‘content maintenance’ issue should be addressed first. Otherwise the ‘item traits’ are going to remain incomplete and lack the minimum content required for buyers to navigate.

Especially in the initial phase of new item traits, the content suggestions should be updated much more quickly. Maybe you need to assign and empower some ‘content pope’ for this? Otherwise sellers are now forced to dump the majority of their new listings in the ‘Other’ folder, which is really not desirable.

So please reconsider your priorities.

Peter