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Does having fun in a positive atmosphere count as a niche? Eh, if not, we're seriously hosed...I think that marketplace experts can get overly fixated on Etsy when they try to answer "what the next successful marketplace will look like?" Of course, Etsy is one of the three horsemen from which we've drawn a lot of aesthetic inspiration, but to take Etsy's success and try to apply it literally to conquering some another category seems to me like a dicey proposition. What category does a marketplace choose? What if they choose wrong? There is enough synergy with handmade goods + artistic types + lots of potential inventory & buyers that the idea works. My personal opinion is that as of today, there isn't another category that one could conquer with anywhere near as much effectiveness as Etsy conquered handmade goods.
If you zoom out from what Etsy has done, and look at what's happening on Bonanzle, I think there is an obvious niche that we are well on our way to conquering: friendly, positive people that enjoy doing business with each other.
What other marketplace can you go to if you want to know you'll find only family-friendly items, people that have a positive spirit, and where a upbeat attitude infuses the forums and booths throughout?
The synergies between positive attitudes, real time interaction, live Bonanzas, and extreme ease of adoption I think are comparably powerful to the synergies between handmade goods, artists, and aesthetic.
Don't believe me? Look at our traffic and growth so far. We have at least tripled in traffic volume the last two months, and are well on our way to doing it for a third month. At the end of this month, our fourth month since launch, our daily unique visitors are projected to be in the neighborhood of the fifth most visited eBay alternative on the Internet. Except that every one of the other alternatives has been around at least two years longer than us. And our growth is almost entirely grassroots.
It's hard to justify fixating on any particular category with numbers like that (not to mention our 50k items added in the last 30 days).
Bonanzle is a niche of a different sort. That is what will continue to drive our organic growth. Bonanzle has found a community of optimistic folks who "get it." We will hold tight to that community, and when they do the same, there will be a new example for business experts to point to when they ask "how can we build the next big thing?"
How did Bill Clinton put it? "It's the users, stupid."
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bharding
Sep 11, 2008
Does Bonanzle Have a Niche?
A business-savvy new user of ours, leeflang_magazines, started a great topic in the forums today that I think gets at a question many folks are probably consciously or subconsciously wondering. He says (very paraphrased):
What I want to know if Bonanzle wants to purely play "real estate with functionality?" Examples of how just playing 'real estate with functionality' does not really work are Ecrater and Wigix. They already reached their ceilings. It means that gradually they will disappear as sellers and buyers won't stick around to wait for a 'critical mass.' Life is too short for that. The reason for their failure is they don't get the 'stickiness' of prospective buyers on their site. Stickiness is what online selling is all about. Even Ebay still does not get that. Amazon does. So does the brand new Etsy (which came out of nowhere and is a big hit), because they targeted a well-rounded seller group and inventory. What niche will Bonanzle conquer to become sticky with buyers and sellers and teach those jerks at eBay a lesson they won't soon forget [OK, he didn't put it quite like that]?My response: Why does a niche have to be a category?
Does having fun in a positive atmosphere count as a niche? Eh, if not, we're seriously hosed...
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12 responses to Does Bonanzle Have a Niche?
Very well put….We HAVE a Niche here…its called FUN!!!
Friendly Sellers that put CUSTOMER SERVICE in the number one slot!
Thanks Bill, well said!
WOW, what a great message Bill, thank you.
Handmade goods and supplies made etsy a special place.
Now Bonanzle is my absolute favorite site and I brag about it to everyone like it was MY OWN site. This is the first site I have joined where you do feel a sense of community, folks who are upbeat, friendly, positive and so happy to work to make Bonanzle a place where people want to come, cruise through the booths and buy a treasure. I love the variety of items being offered here. Everything from freebies to luxury jewelry, truly something for everyone.
Bill and Mark are top notch and we are fortunate they have come together are created this Community Marketplace called Bonanzle.
(i still have the old Bonanza show theme song in my head, love it!)
Thanks for the post. I’m one of those “optimistic folks” who “gets it” and am passing along…
Oh..Great Octobermoon!…NOW its stuck in my head! Da dada dada… dah… dah!
Bill,
Great idea! Great site execution!
Not sure though where you got that I was thinking of ‘product niching’ as a critical succesfactor for Bonanzle. I was not.
If anything, my point is that ‘content’ (quantity and quality) is what drives the stickiness, so visibility of any site, including yours.
Acquiring ‘content experts’ for your product categories should be a priority.
If you do not, you’ll reach a ceiling, the site at best with good willing beginners and the content will be shallow and incomplete, so not attractive, not sticky, for buyers.
Buyers buy and spen most where the inventory and know-how is best and most plentiful. That is why Amazon was so succesful with their initial focus on books only. They built up total expertise in that area and it made their site ‘sticky’ beyond anything before in teh are of books.
Specific knowledge (so product group related) shoudl be a necessary requirement as different product groups/industries have developed different languages, different customer bases, different tools, different standards. Ebay failed to recognize this initially and wanted to be a everything for everybody and ended up being unsatisfactorily for every product group since their site is too shallow, too non-specific, too generic.
Wigix tried to break through this by promising getting category experts and product/sku expert owners. They failed because they did not know how to acquire these experts (or they had no plan for it and believed in ’miraculous expert acquisition).
Meanwhile ‘expert product oriented sites’ are popping up left and right to fill in the gaps. Etsy is just the beginning.
Ebay is trying to catch up a little by creating a catalog with more product group specific standardized information (like item specifics), but that won’t happen overnight.
The simplest example is that different product groups require different templates for listing items. One group will have MSRP and another will not (like with antiques), another group will have ‘condition’ as an attribute that changes pricing and will even have a whole scale of condition grading standards (like used books or paintings), while again a different product group will have only a two tier ‘condition’ scale, if any (sually very new items). A book will need an ISN #, but a car will not, etc.. Some producst have warranties, others have not.
The better Bonanzle offers standardized ‘product group’ related ‘item information’, so expert online documentation, the stickier its site will be for buyers, the more attractive, the more competitive.
My out-of-the-box suggestion (which Wigix tried, but failed to do well), is to have such experts, catalog content contributors share in the revenue in exchange for them providing content and maintaining it.
You would thus jump ahead in attractiveness for sellers to come here and the buyers would follow.
By the way, as far as more general philosophy, I believe that you can beat any of the other sites by remaining a place of ‘liberty’, of laissez-faire (and promoting it that way), where buyers and sellers are FREE, so virtually unrestricted and only ‘optional services/functionality’ are offered, not mandates. ‘Opt in/opt out’ should be a hallmark aspect of the Bonanzle site. Ebay originally operated that way a long time ago and grew explosively until they abandoned their accidental philosophy for dictatorship.
The degree of your rules, your restrictions and of your attitude to protect your buyers and sellers againts external factors and against abuse by the few bad guys that will come in (as they always do) is what will determine your success.
Very well put….We HAVE a Niche here…its called FUN!!!
Friendly Sellers that put CUSTOMER SERVICE in the number one slot!
Thanks Bill, well said!
WOW, what a great message Bill, thank you.
Handmade goods and supplies made etsy a special place.
Now Bonanzle is my absolute favorite site and I brag about it to everyone like it was MY OWN site. This is the first site I have joined where you do feel a sense of community, folks who are upbeat, friendly, positive and so happy to work to make Bonanzle a place where people want to come, cruise through the booths and buy a treasure. I love the variety of items being offered here. Everything from freebies to luxury jewelry, truly something for everyone.
Bill and Mark are top notch and we are fortunate they have come together are created this Community Marketplace called Bonanzle.
(i still have the old Bonanza show theme song in my head, love it!)
Thanks for the post. I’m one of those “optimistic folks” who “gets it” and am passing along…
Oh..Great Octobermoon!…NOW its stuck in my head! Da dada dada… dah… dah!
Bill,
Great idea! Great site execution!
Not sure though where you got that I was thinking of ‘product niching’ as a critical succesfactor for Bonanzle. I was not.
If anything, my point is that ‘content’ (quantity and quality) is what drives the stickiness, so visibility of any site, including yours.
Acquiring ‘content experts’ for your product categories should be a priority.
If you do not, you’ll reach a ceiling, the site at best with good willing beginners and the content will be shallow and incomplete, so not attractive, not sticky, for buyers.
Buyers buy and spen most where the inventory and know-how is best and most plentiful. That is why Amazon was so succesful with their initial focus on books only. They built up total expertise in that area and it made their site ‘sticky’ beyond anything before in teh are of books.
Specific knowledge (so product group related) shoudl be a necessary requirement as different product groups/industries have developed different languages, different customer bases, different tools, different standards. Ebay failed to recognize this initially and wanted to be a everything for everybody and ended up being unsatisfactorily for every product group since their site is too shallow, too non-specific, too generic.
Wigix tried to break through this by promising getting category experts and product/sku expert owners. They failed because they did not know how to acquire these experts (or they had no plan for it and believed in ’miraculous expert acquisition).
Meanwhile ‘expert product oriented sites’ are popping up left and right to fill in the gaps. Etsy is just the beginning.
Ebay is trying to catch up a little by creating a catalog with more product group specific standardized information (like item specifics), but that won’t happen overnight.
The simplest example is that different product groups require different templates for listing items. One group will have MSRP and another will not (like with antiques), another group will have ‘condition’ as an attribute that changes pricing and will even have a whole scale of condition grading standards (like used books or paintings), while again a different product group will have only a two tier ‘condition’ scale, if any (sually very new items). A book will need an ISN #, but a car will not, etc.. Some producst have warranties, others have not.
The better Bonanzle offers standardized ‘product group’ related ‘item information’, so expert online documentation, the stickier its site will be for buyers, the more attractive, the more competitive.
My out-of-the-box suggestion (which Wigix tried, but failed to do well), is to have such experts, catalog content contributors share in the revenue in exchange for them providing content and maintaining it.
You would thus jump ahead in attractiveness for sellers to come here and the buyers would follow.
By the way, as far as more general philosophy, I believe that you can beat any of the other sites by remaining a place of ‘liberty’, of laissez-faire (and promoting it that way), where buyers and sellers are FREE, so virtually unrestricted and only ‘optional services/functionality’ are offered, not mandates. ‘Opt in/opt out’ should be a hallmark aspect of the Bonanzle site. Ebay originally operated that way a long time ago and grew explosively until they abandoned their accidental philosophy for dictatorship.
The degree of your rules, your restrictions and of your attitude to protect your buyers and sellers againts external factors and against abuse by the few bad guys that will come in (as they always do) is what will determine your success.
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