posted on March 5, 2001 03:55:16 AM new
Guess a lot of yahoo sellers (like me) moved to bidville. Now the buyers have to find the site. This might take a little while.
heikejohn everywhere else!
posted on March 5, 2001 04:33:05 AM new
I have 100 auctions listed there. mostly glass and china collectibles. have 28 closed successfully and currently 60 have bids. Most of these auctions are starting low. But this is not the most popular categories either. So There is activity and many of us have formed a network of clubs to promote these auctions, I just can't do it on Aw naturally.
...JIM
[email protected]
typos, typos, typos!
[ edited by jimhhow on Mar 5, 2001 04:34 AM ]
posted on March 5, 2001 06:49:14 AM new
60% of bidville is trading cards, books, stamps and coins. It doesn't take too many higher-volume sellers in these categories to raise the total number of auctions. I suspect a number of "yahoo refugees" landed there, and will stay until fees are imposed. Where they will go then is anyone's guess...
posted on March 5, 2001 07:38:48 AM new
I have a large inventory which I can park on any site which is functional. (Including the 15 megs of web space allotted by my ISP if all the free auctions sites vanish).
The auction sites provide a convienient place for me to list, categorize, and update my inventory while keeping track of sales.
Most of my sales result from my own advertising. Any sales provided by traffic on the auction site is a bonus.
Bidville is reliable, easy to list with, and will auto relist all your inventory for months. I believe the traffic on the site is as good as, and in most cases better than most of the current free sites.
posted on March 5, 2001 08:06:32 AM new
Cap'n ... Spot On!
Also, if Bidville ever figures out a way to end all of their listings for ILLEGAL items (a la SafeHarbour but staffed with real live humans instead of idiot 'bots), the total number of listings would drop by another few thousand.
OTOH, it does seem to be working for a few sellers and that is a good thing
posted on March 5, 2001 08:29:55 AM new
Really.. Sounds Interesting... So how come members @ AW prefer BidVille over other smaller auction sites (I.E> BidBay, ePier, eDeal, etc.)?
posted on March 5, 2001 10:15:01 AM new
I sat on the sidelines for about a month and read posts from sellers about their experiences when moving to and using the smaller sites.
None seemed to have a clear advantage of a large buyer base.
Sellers were reporting that Bidville was well laid out, very helpful in providing live customer service, co-operative to suggestions for making positive changes, had good site performance, would do the work of automatically transfering your YAHOO listings for free and offered the basic structure/services that I wanted.
I remembered their origional attempt to benifit from the arrival of PayPal on the auction scene and their willingness to change their name (Auxpal to Bidville) which I think was positive. They are a service of the company that started a fixed price site which I believe is a trend that will have a growing share of the marketplace.
Everything taken together, I was left with the opinion that they were a business that was innovative, flexable and interested in working with independent sellers.
Not the only choice available and maybe they will not prove to have been the best option but enough fundamentals are in place to make it worthwhile for me to give it a serious try.
No site is perfect for everybody and hindsight might cause me to look back in 2002 and say "I should have known better" but for now , given the information I have, it seems like the best choice for me.
Edited to add - I use a combination of BIN and regular auctions on eBay. Off eBay almost all my offerings are fixed priced listings (1st Bid Wins on YAHOO/Take It Now on BVille, etc.) Any bid thus results in an immediate sale, the auction closes and disappears from the list of open items.
This results in the appearance of no activity. On YAHOO I might have had ten sales a week but never had a open listing showing a bid.
To the extent any sizable number of sellers are using this same pricing approach, bids on open listings will not accurately reflect all the sales taking place on Bidville or any other site offering this pricing option.
[ edited by reston_ray on Mar 5, 2001 10:35 AM ]
posted on March 5, 2001 10:31:59 PM new
You know I continually read comments reference the fact that we should probably expect Bidville to eventually charge listing fees. Well perhaps they will one day. But many of us have on file a written pledge to never be charged a listing fee. I believe this guarantee went out to people who listed with them prior to a certain date. The deadline might not have passed yet. Perhaps if you worry about this you should check it out and see if you can still get the guarantee in writing. Another point that amazes me is that some people keep talking down the site because it doesn't have much traffic. Where do all the businesses in the world start? Usually at the bottom. I will say that in the last month or so, traffic at Bidville has increased in my opinion and I truly expect it to continue to rise. Will it reach the FORMER Yahoo volume? Who knows at this point. Time will tell but I think it's headed in that direction. Doesn't cost anything to test the waters. JUMP IN!
posted on March 6, 2001 07:03:18 AM new
Bidville is the #1 free site now. Should I list somewhere else because there is a remote chance they do not live up to their free listing guarantee? That's like saying I should have quit listing on Yahoo over a year ago when it was free because now they are charging fees. It's also very possible that Bidville could start charging a fee for sellers that registered after 3-10-01 and stay profitable. There would be no mass exodus as seen on Yahoo because they will always have a core of sellers that are listing for free.
No, don't list elsewhere just because bidville *might* impose fees. However, consider in advance the "more likely than not" possibility of bidville imposing fees of some sort, and whether you can live with them or not; if not, is it worth your while to establish yourself elsewhere or not?
The "doomsday scenario" (mass exodus) with bidville is that they impose fees on "new" sellers only, but then all the "new" sellers move on to the next free auction, leaving only "old" sellers, and bidville is forced to reneg on their "promise" (which, as RB notes, is really worth nothing) and starts charging even "old" sellers - you know, the ones who really are there only because its free, the ones who arrived on the original mass exodus from Yahoo.
Unless they have some sort of magic (the kind of magic that even Yahoo with their huge portal traffic and advertising $ didn't have), its hard to see how they can continue as they are. Just be prepared.
PS - I vote with whoever thought that maybe bidville is just trying to get big enough and annoying enough to be bought out by ebay. Now that most IPOs are dead, the next best thing is a whole bunch of ebay stock dropped on you in exchange for your startup. The end result is still the same for the founders - a lot of $.
[ edited by captainkirk on Mar 6, 2001 09:12 AM ]
posted on March 6, 2001 09:29:32 AM new
Just wondering if anyone has seen this notice on BidVille's about us page:
NoBidding, Inc. has plans to be traded publicly before January 2002.
NoBidding is the company which owns bidville. Am I the only one who is slightly troubled by the thought of a free site going stockholder based? All stockholders see are dollars and cents, and lines which go up and down....
posted on March 6, 2001 11:10:08 AM new
I'm having no luck on Bidville. I do like the way it's set up and the image hosting. I'm having better luck on Lycos and Epier.
"If man were to be crossed with a cat, it would greatly improve the man, but deteriorate the cat." Mark Twain
posted on March 6, 2001 11:21:40 AM new
I listed on eBay, Yahoo, and now Bidville. I've never assumed that any one of them would work for me forever. I know which one works for me now. Bidville
posted on March 6, 2001 11:55:34 AM new
As long as it works for you right now, that's great.
I just feel bad sometimes for the sellers I hear saying about the work they are doing to establish themselves on bidville (losing $ on sales, advertising their auctions there, etc), and hope their investment doesn't go down the tubes in the near future.
I just continue to wonder how bidville plans to establish themselves permanently, grow, and go public with no observable source of revenue. Something has to give...
posted on March 6, 2001 12:13:50 PM new
I was wondering the same thing about Auction Watch. Definitely a shakeout on the way with all these auction sites and listing services.
posted on March 6, 2001 01:34:19 PM new
I HADE 575 CLOSED AT 'Y' EMAILED BIDVILLE AND IN 15 MINUTES THEY RELISTED EVERYONE ONTO THEIR SITE ---TALK ABOUT USER FRIENDLY.....AND WHAT A TIMESAVER.....JUST HOPE THEY DON'T TURN AROUND AND START CHARGING......THEY ARE IMPROVING THEIR SITE SET UP DAILY ....
posted on March 6, 2001 01:47:33 PM new
Given that they plan to go public, how much would an investor pay for a company with no revenue?
Now how many people here think they won't impose fees in the near future?
Unfortunately (for all of us) advertising has not proven to the revenue souce people had thought it would be. So unlike free tv, its not looking like free services on the internet are a sustainable business model.
Interestingly, i just got an email from Juno, about them renting out time on everyone's PCs to help solve large-scale computing problems. Said they "might" start requiring people with free email to leave their PCs on at night to work on these problems. Actually, I think its kinda cool thing to do, so it doesn't bother me, but its just another sign that "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"...
posted on March 6, 2001 02:17:03 PM new
RB
Please forgive me if my recognition of Bidville's written promise to never charge listing fees to the early members of the site made me appear as if I was born yesterday. I understand that some people no matter what cannot or will not honor their word. I know that the Bidville people who made these written promises may one day retract their pledge should they no longer feel we are needed by them to make the site go (YouWho Yahoo). I truly understand that people in this life can and will let you down. My life will go on if they do and I know some day they will discuss their level of honor with God as I to will have to do. In other words, I let God handle those things and don't get too tied up into whether everyone is trustworthy or not. I assume they are until they show me they aren't and then I move on if necessary.
posted on March 6, 2001 02:43:10 PM new
captainkirk;
Reading the posts here, it seems obvious, to me anyway that many of us are committed to one degree or another to making Bidville work, with the understanding that nothing lasts forever, and someday it may be time to move from there also.
It also seems pretty evident that almost everytime someone posts something positive about Bidville, or expresses an optimistic opinion, you have to somehow combat that with a pessimistic opinion.
You certainly are entitled to your opinion, and have every right to post it I'm sure. But the whole scenario of your rebuttal to almost every positive post really has me wondering about the intention of the posts. Some of us have stated the reasons that we are definitely Bidville cheerleaders in an honest and forthright manner. I would like to ask you to do the same thing for your posts. I would like to know why you continue to COMBAT any positive opinion of Bidville.
Are you of the opinion that we should all be listing our auctions on another site? Or do you think that maybe we should just hang it up and go back to yard sales?
I find it hard to believe that your diligence is due to being concerned for the amount of work that sellers are doing to build the site. From the tone of your posts one might think that you were talking down to us, like trying to impart a lesson to ignorant children.
So please understand that I do not intend this question to be combative, but I am genuinely curious about your motives?
removed an errant 'a'
[ edited by jimhhow on Mar 6, 2001 02:45 PM ]
posted on March 6, 2001 07:30:38 PM new
While I love that it is free, I could live with a FVF, or possible a low listing fee (although it would reduce the number of auctions I ran if it was a per listing) - So far, I am pleased with them.
People keep complaining about no bids. I don't know what others are doing, but just about all of my stuff there is set to close on the first bid. So, as soon as someone bids, the auction closes, and if you try to look for active bids, you won't find many. On ebay, I starting things out low, and watch the bidding raise the price. There isn't enough traffic on Bidville to really do that yet.
posted on March 7, 2001 06:56:43 AM new
I found it very easy to list and navigate there. I also like the fact that they seem to be owned and operated by decent people with integrity!!
MEOW pft pft!!
>^,,^^,,^<
posted on March 7, 2001 11:46:27 AM new
Looking at Bidville one aspect that I disliked is the ease with which a seller can post their buy priced "auction" to close every day for over 3 months. This clogs the list of items closing each day to always include immense numbers of the same offerings, killing off return browsing. I would recommend that they cut this off. Being able to post an offering to sit for a very long time with no further attention is great, but combining that with daily closing stinks.
