Anyone use bidstart?
hhmag70
Posts: 2,107
Looking for some feedback from anyone who has used bidstart? Looks like a collectables version of eBay. I do not recall Storm mentioning anything about them.
0
Comments
A brief background:
We're the top stamp site on the Internet (yes, bigger than ebay) and have been around since 2005. We would love to see sports cards take off on the site but it doesn't happen without the assistance of the community. Our sellers like us because we're extremely responsive, approachable, have low fees (and no listing fees) and lots of great features. We very much believe it's a two-way street. If you do well we do well and visa-versa. We're not out to nickel and dime our users or put out lots of conflicting complicated rules to make it harder for them to do what they want to do. We very much listen to our customers and that input will often affect changes here. For example, consider coins. We're the only site on the entire Internet that allows sellers to tie their prices to spot gold. On other marketplaces sellers often need to change their prices daily or even more frequently. On our site it's all automatic. That came from direct feedback from the sellers. Same situation in many of our other categories.
For sports sellers, due to ongoing promotions, it's a pay-as-you-go situation so you won't have any costs to give it a shot if it doesn't work for you other than the time to list. If you have an ebay store we have a full ebay-approved (that's not a typo) ebay store sync that (at your option) will copy over all your store items and keep them in full sync on both sites. Put up a new item on ebay and it appears on bidStart. Sell an item on bidStart and it immediately closes on ebay.
We also have some great marketing tools to drive traffic to your store and that helps to offset the issue of selling while a category is maturing. Really it's up to you.
Thanks for at least considering us.
Director of Marketing
bidStart.com
rich@bidStart.com
856-857-1777
Just had a very pleasant converstion with Rich. Site sounds like it has some serious potential. I am going to start a Store there next week when I get back from a camping trip. I especially like the ability to import from E-Bay with minimal headaches and the Custom Newsletter sent to all of your present customers. Will let you know how it works out.
Neil
In general, the more stores we put stuff into, the more
stuff we will sell.
I like delcampe for stamps and postcards, and bidstart looks
good, too.
...............
The "multichannel" concept is where we are all headed, but
I am not a big advocate of "syncing."
MANY alt-site buyers want/expect fresh merch and they wanna
pay less for items on non-destination sites than they do on EBAY.
Rotation is, obviously, MUCH more work than syncing, but I much
prefer it.
The MOST important caveat with alt sites is that if you adopt
the "build it and they will come" philosophy, you WILL be VERY
discouraged VERY quickly.
Non-destination sites cannot provide anywhere near the traffic
that EBAY and AMZN can deliver. The VAST majority of your
buyers will come from search engines; spending money on AdSense
type ads AND working your tail off on the social-media sites will help
a lot, but there is ONLY one EBAY.
...........
EBAY "owns" the trading card categories and that is not going to
change anytime soon. BUT, it is certainly worthwhile to try new
spots CONSTANTLY; most will not produce, some will --- and you
cannot know the difference unless you make the listing effort.
http://www.bidstart.com/sitefees.php
..........
As I have been noting for the past several weeks, IF goog were to
acquire eCrater - or another ongoing site - a seachange could/would
be seen almost overnight. Absent a BIG player in the fight, we really
have no choice but to keep using the Evil Empire and trying ALL of
the little spots.
I would argue that sync'ing isn't as problematic as you suggest. Many of our sellers will run specials here so buyers then realize they have a choice. Stick with ebay and pay more of support the "new guys" and pay less. The vast majority then begin the migration. Having distinct inventories, on the other hand, we've found generates even more confusion with buyers. They end up having to spend much more time shopping different sites with different features and different levels of complexity.
I agree fully on the "if you build it they will come" trap. ebay has given a lot of sellers the impression that they have great business sense when a lot of them weren't there in the early days. They put up cards and those cards sold and they equate that with business sense. It's like suggesting you have great business sense if you hit the lottery. We will often get sellers who show up and actually make decent money and still leave because they didn't make what they make on ebay. That one always blows me away. One seller recently sold $4,000 worth of coins in a month and closed his store saying it isn't worth "the hassle". Hassle? His store was sync'ed with ebay. No extra effort at all. It's the same as if he has $4,000 extra in sales from ebay in a month with a higher profit margin but because he makes $15,000 a month at ebay then we weren't worth it for him. That sort of thinking I'll never understand. Plus he literally did nothing other than the initial setup. No marketing. No specials. No nothing.
With minimal effort and some basic patience a lot can happen but if you come expecting money to just fall out of the sky then you will be disappointed.
I will also disagree with the comment that non-ebay sites cannot match the traffic ebay gets. Simply not true. It's a factor of the effort. We have many sellers who get far more traffic on bidStart than they get or got on ebay. However, they work at it. One seller just in the last year sold over $200,000 in postcards blowing away the money, traffic and costs of his ebay store. However, he spent the time to let all his customers know about bidStart and religiously sent out newsletters and ran specials to drive reticent buyers to give us a try. Now he's reliably generating the same results month-in month-out with minimal effort. That's one of the big distinctions between us and other marketplaces and we're quite proud of it.
BTW, how does one set their own avatar here? I've looked everywhere and the only option I get is to pick from a pre-existing list.
Director of Marketing
bidStart.com
rich@bidStart.com
856-857-1777
Another potential issue with syncing:
A number of eCrater and Bonanza sellers have had their
google feeds suspended for "double listing."
Syncing the same items on more than one site appears
to be a goog TOS violation. BUT, since relatively few folks
are claiming to be "suspended," there must be somekind
of tolerance for the practice. (I have seen my own eCrater
items absent from google shopping, when I have them listed
on EBAY at the same time. BUT, I have never been scolded
about it by goog.)
The workaround that many folks use is to "hide" the dupes
that are on eCrater and simply rotate the items to other
sites. The google feeds can also be self-supressed at eCrater
and Bonanza; this leaves sellers to get their buyers from
organic traffic which is VERY scarce.
Anybody at bidstart get any goog grief for double listings when
they sync with EBAY?
.....................................
It is true that traffic can be driven to the alt-sites. It is a
tremendously hard job and most folks lack the skill/patience
to do the job.
MY personal experience - so far - is that the social sites are
great for driving traffic, but not great for creating sales. I
have experimented with a number of categories - not collectibles -
and get a few sales from FBK/TWT but not a bunch. If the
results of such campaigns are cumulative, I have a TON more
work to do.
In my alt-site spots, about ZERO sales are organic; they almost
all come from search engines. That remains the weakness of the
non-destination sites AND the ONLY cure may be a mass exodus
of sellers from EABY to one or two alts; that exodus is hard to
orchestrate because EVERYBODY wants to keep making money
there, even if/when EBAY is mean to them.
..............................
Alexa Tonight:
bidstart.com
89,386 Global Rank
24,464 Rank in US
58 Sites Linking In
Statistics Summary for bidstart.com
Bidstart.com is ranked #89,386 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings, and it has a relatively good traffic rank in the city of Atlanta (#2,573). Visitors to this site spend roughly five minutes per visit to the site and 39 seconds per pageview. Search engines refer about 29% of visits to Bidstart.com. This site has a bounce rate of roughly 40% (i.e., 40% of visits consist of only one pageview).
bonanza.com
6,068 Global Rank
1,291 Rank in US
1,005 Sites Linking In
Statistics Summary for bonanza.com
Bonanza has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 6,068. Roughly 39% of visits to the site consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces). We estimate that 78% of visitors to the site come from the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 1,291. Compared with internet averages, the site's users are disproportionately Caucasian, and they tend to be women over the age of 35 who have no postgraduate education and browse from home. Bonanza.com has been online since 1997.
ecrater.com
4,201 Global Rank
1,251 Rank In US
1,708 Sites Linking In
Statistics Summary for ecrater.com
Ecrater.com's three-month global Alexa traffic rank is 4,201. Visitors to the site view 8.4 unique pages each day on average. The site has been online for more than seven years. Ecrater.com is particularly popular among users in the cities of Providence (where it is ranked #218), Dallas-Fort Worth (#700), and Orlando (#761). Roughly 34% of visits to the site are bounces (one pageview only).
etsy.com
202 Global Rank
53 Rank In US
29,144 Sites Linking In
Statistics Summary for etsy.com
There are 201 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Etsy.com. Relative to the overall population of internet users, its users are disproportionately Caucasian, and they tend to be moderately educated women between the ages of 25 and 35 who browse from home and have incomes between $30,000 and $100,000. The site has been online for at least seven years. The time spent in a typical visit to Etsy.com is approximately ten minutes, with 28 seconds spent on each pageview. The site's visitors view an average of 15.7 unique pages per day.
EBAY.COM
24 Global Rank
10 Rank In US
22,331 Sites Linking In
Statistics Summary for ebay.com
Ebay.com is ranked #24 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. Visitors to the site view an average of 18.6 unique pages per day. The site is in the “Auctions” category of sites. Ebay.com has been online for more than fifteen years, and the site has attained a traffic rank of 10 among users in the US, where we estimate that 64% of its audience is located.
////////////////////
Today's raw numbers mean very little when trying to predict what
might happen with future growth patterns.
The numbers do say that EVERY alt-site is at a severe disadvantage
to the first-to-market desitination site.
If it was easy - and profitable - goog/msft/yhoo would have already
done it. The more folks that keep trying, the better.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
How does a company get consumers of collectibles to think of an
alt-site when they wanna buy stuff?
Those consumers are almost hopelessly conditioned to go directly
to EBAY. There is a way to capture them, but nobody has figured
it out, yet.
To kill "the" destination site, a newer/kinder/gentler destination site
will have to crack the code.
I am sure that most of the "code" involves simply getting TONS of sellers
to stop listing on EBAY and start listing on a single alt-site, but I have NO
clue how to do that.
BTW, how does one set their own avatar here? I've looked everywhere and the only option I get is to pick from a pre-existing list.
//////////////////////
I think the 15th of each month is still avatar upload day.
If you miss that day, you have to wait another month.
I think if you also take the time to ask any of our sellers who actually utilize our tools they'll tell you, quite emphatically, that the effort to get traffic here is rather minimal. It is effort. You can't just list and expect it to show up in our newer categories but otherwise we're talking literally a couple minutes a week or less (depending on how often you reach out).
Google continues to be a key driver for our sales as well which is why we live, eat and breath everything Google. Much depends on the category in question. Stamp people come right to us and by-pass Google. Some of the others get nothing without Google. It all depends.
On getting people to think of a site first--forget it. I know ebay people and even they don't believe it works that way. They realized they were wasting money advertising and we've yet to find any proof that traditional marketing or any social marketing has any impact on that fact. The point is most people think of the item and head to Google.
Director of Marketing
bidStart.com
rich@bidStart.com
856-857-1777