All Entries Tagged With: "Selling Online"

Finding Everything but the Ordinary

Where are you doing your online shopping? For many people one of the places they automatically go to is eBay. If you haven’t’ been there for a while you are going to notice something fairly quickly, eBay is not what it used to be.

Many buyers this year are finding that much of the old quirkiness and unique finds are missing. What happened? eBay has new management and they believe what people want is brand new, out of the box, thousands of the same item available buying experience. The problem is that in my experience people were shopping there for the unique and hard to find, not just the same old stuff you can pick up at any mall.

But why is that unique stuff hard to find on eBay these days?  The smaller sellers like us have been priced out of the venue – the fees were just getting too high and we got tired of raising our prices to cover more and more fees.

Most of the sellers who left eBay are still selling, they are just scattered at several dozen other sites. I think I just heard some moans there…who wants to shop at dozens of sites to find one unique thing. Not me, that’s for sure! There is still an easy way to find your unique items, Google Product Search (also known as Google Shopping) http://www.google.com/products or Google Base http://www.google.com/base. Never heard of them? They are the greatest. They enable you to search all the best of the online stores. Stores submit information on their products to Google, often on a daily basis, so you can search thousands of stores at once. These searches will not pick up the inventory from all stores, because each store is responsible for giving Google their product information. If the store doesn’t submit a feed, they are not included. What is amazing is Google doesn’t even charge a fee for this service, to either the buyer or seller, which is perfect for smaller retailers like us.

Product Search is pretty straightforward, type in your search terms, and you get pages of what you want. Base is a little more sophisticated. There are dropdown boxes so you can narrow your search. They are both very useful.

What if you just want to browse, and don’t have a particular item in mind? We have our extensive inventory at a very nice new site, http://www.bonanzle.com. There are over 2000 other sellers of the unique that have opened up shop on the site, with more every day. The site is growing at the rate of over 1000 new users (buyer and new sellers) and 30,000 new items a week. Bonanzle’s motto is “Find Everything but the Ordinary”. You won’t find the Virgin Mary’s image burned into a piece of toast there, but there are plenty of other fun things to keep you happily browsing for a while.

Our booth is at http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/ANightOwl