Bonanzle Booth Set-Up
Officially launched in late 2008 Bonanzle.com has grown at an amazing rate of 70% per month through the beginning of 2009. It is now the 3rd biggest alternative to eBay in online traffic volume. Bonanzle was awarded the ‘best ebay alternative’ for 2008 by small business computing http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/.
What makes this new-comer so exciting? It does what eBay did so well in their beginning – created a community. Chief Raconteur, Mark Dorsey calls Bonanzle “a social marketplace for buyers and sellers.” Once a seller sets up a booth (your selling account, which is free) buyers can have a ‘live chat’ with you via a text message dialog. There are forums for buyers and sellers and the atmosphere is very cordial. If you feel mean spirited, there is a special forum for you as well – it’s called “drama”.
Founder Bill Harding wanted to “create a simple marketplace that people could have fun and is easy to use.” I think he hit a home run here. Bonanzle is easy to join, setting up a booth is simple and listing an item takes just a minute or two. Bonanzle has a few helpful tools to get sellers from eBay to come over. With a few mouse clicks you can import your eBay store listings and if you wish to build your reputation quickly you can bring over your last 5,000 feedback.
Built into the site is a simple way to set up a Google feed to build traffic into your both quickly. Currently about 50% of Bonanzle’s traffic comes from Google – so it’s great they make it easy to get listed. A button to announce your products on twitter and a simple way to create a widget to put into your blog or on a website make getting the word out about your products simple.
Bonanzle is about fixed priced listings, but your buyer has an open channel to negotiate prices, or dicker so expect a little negotiation before the price is settled. To help you set the value of your item, Bonanzle has a tool called the “Price Guesser” which pulls in the top five prices from Amazon.com and from Internet Shopping Comparison sites.
Another fun feature to build the community and bring traffic into your store is a section called “Freebie” where you can offer items for free. This is a great way to bring in shoppers by offering a free item with purchase – or just clean out the junk that is accumulating in your office.
Other marketing tools Bonanzle offers include a feature called a “Bonanza” a short term (usually just a few hours) super sale in your booth. Sellers set them up and plan on hanging around their booth to welcome buyers into the store. These Bonanzas are posted on the site, to help you build excitement.
Final value fees are very affordable, and locked until the end of 2010 from .50 cents to $10.00 max. Listings are on the site forever, or until you sell the item or remove it from your booth. There are no set listing times.
As a seller you can accept payment via PayPal, Cash, Checks, Money Orders, Google check-out, Chinese checkers, matches, trade or any method you wish – no restrictions. And, you are allowed to negotiate outside the platform – there is an honor system in place. If you sell the item via any other method than the ‘buy now’ button on Bonanzle, they ask you to let them know – but don’t police the sellers.
Short on time or not ready to commit to learning a whole new venue? We can help.
If you are an eBay seller we can import your items into Bonanzle, edit out those ‘eBay centric’ listing specifics and have you up and running in no time.
Setup includes:
- Importing your listings from eBay (if you wish us to list items without the eBay import tool, contact us for a quote based on number of items).
- Header design and installation (with client supplied logo)
- Avatar creation (branded based on your logo)
- Bonazle user profile set-up (based on eBay About me page information, or supplied information you supply)
- Google Base connector set-up
- Training one-hour, one on one, web tutorial
Cost: 250.00
If you prefer to let someone else run your booth – we’ll be happy to help.
Our monthly fee varies depending on booth size generally ranging from $19.99 – $29.99 per month.
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