You should be the one to open the Challenger to eBay and “seize the day by collecting as many of the fleeing sellers as possible to your own site!”

It doesn’t appear OLA or… Bill Harding/Founder of Bonanzle or… any of the others are in a position or gearing towards the direction to fill in the void or need for a Seller Site that Models itself the way eBay “use to be” that made it a successful avenue for so many years.

Another Marketing problem I didn’t see touched upon is Brand or Website NAME.

ebay.com <— very easy to remember.

OnlineAuction.com <— Easy, but too long.
OLA.COM <— Very Good!;-) Now they NEED to Promote it!

Bonanzle.com <— What?
I can’t even pronounce it, let a lone remember and spell it.

etsy.com <— What is this? Short, but doesn’t make sense.

Most of these are probably already taken, but…
eSell.com
eBuy.com
eBuyAndSell.com
BASE.COM <— BuyAndSellEasy.com
eSellAndBuy.com
eAuction.com
eAuctions.com
eDeals.com
eWay.com
eBuyItNow.com
eAuctionItNow.com
eMakeOffer.com

Anyway, doesn’t look like eBay will have a Challenger or significant Competition any time soon.

Tom

Sellers don’t treat eBay like a traditional business.. which requires marketing, which in turn drives traffic. Whether that’s customers to your brick and mortar or clicks from search results.

A few years ago I began focusing my efforts on using off eBay strategies to drive traffic to my eBay listings and store, and supplemented that with Affiliate programs. I’ve been more than satisfied with results.

True, I could use those same techniques to send traffic to my own eCommerce site and save myself some fees, but I could never compete with the traffic that is already on eBay and that eBay generates from it’s pure presence.

Either way, I’ve found that not only myself, but others I help sell have found using those same methods work well for them and have not been hurt as much.

Jeff

I think your analysis is spot on as to the value of a well-designed affiliate program. Bonanzle will get there. When it comes time to try to implement an effective affiliate program, many sites get caught up in the first step — having the revenue stream available to fund such a program. Bonanzle has been amongst those sites so far, but with memberships and FVFs finally starting to percolate in October, we should soon have the financial flexibility to get past step one.

The other reason it hasn’t happened yet at Bonanzle is that, quite frankly, we haven’t wanted to grow any faster than we have. Growing by a factor of 3x monthly takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep the site stable as it scales. I suspect that in the months to come, as our growth levels out a bit more, it will leave us with the cycles we need to be able to exercise volition in choosing what to work on (rather than the current mandate to focus solely on keeping the site fast and stable in the face of the increasing traffic). Like Henrietta says, we have only been seriously growing for a couple/few months now.

Great writeup, look forward to more in the future.
Bill Harding
Founder, Bonanzle

One very minor correction.

While Bonanzle existed as a website in June, it did not ‘open for business’ in Beta and start recruiting sellers until mid July. Bonanzle announced the end of Beta September 3rd, 47 days or 6-1/2 weeks ago.

A simple analogy would be that the smart shop owner does not open the doors for buyers and have a grand opening until all the merchandise is in and displayed.

In today’s economy, and given the technical challenge & expense of keeping up with the existing enormous increases in organically generated traffic, I believe Bonanzle has chosen the wise route developmentally.

By growing steadily and spending resources on platform stability and technical enhancements to improve speed and usability for both buyers and sellers, rather than traffic generation, Bonanzle does not risk the crash and burn outage and instability cycles that have plagued (and killed off) so many sales venues.

Bonanzle has no desire to be yet another shaky second rate ‘eBay alternative’!

Please note that this is opinion, I am not authorized to speak for the company in any way nor do I have any financial position in Bonanzle beyond being a satisfied user.

Thanks,Cliff