posted on March 6, 2001 10:50:08 AM
Hearing about it on this message board, I decided to check out the auctions at pootah.com When I went there I found a very well-organized, clean-cut website. I wasn't sure what LFs or FVFs there were so I emailed support. I received a very imformative reply within a very short about of time. Try getting that from ebah or yoohoo... Anyway I signed up, listed an item I was going to list anyway, and checked back at the homepage. I glanced quick and saw my name "We'd like to welcome our newest user, grumpy1." I just 'moved in' and I already feel at home. I'd just like to reccomend this site to everyone. Check it out, even if it's only for the novelty of the name. Who couldn't like a site named "pootah.com" ?
posted on March 6, 2001 12:58:51 PM
You 'auction youngsters' may not remember this, but in it's infancy, eBay had great customer support too. They responded in a personal way to all questions, usually within a day or two. Some (most) of the responders did their best to fake sincerity ("gosh golly gee whiz, we're so sorry you are having a bad experience", but at least you felt that there was someone at the other end of your email pipe.
It was a real "community" way back then, but then the site grew ...
Like most businesses, when it was small it could afford to offer personalized service, but as it grew and the owners got further away from their customers (i.e. out yachting or whatever these rich folks do), customer service started to decline. Once the owners saw how easy it was to make the big bucks, they became really cheap and they didn't want to spend any of their new wealth on hiring additional staff to maintain the level of service.
In most cases, it is a much more pleasureable experience dealing with a small company, and many small businesses are very successful.
In the case of an on-line auction venue though, as soon as people discover that they can make a living without actually having to get up and go out, the site grows. It cannot survive by remaining small and personal.
At this point, their members have also seen how easy it is to make money and they are hooked. They follow like sheep, stand at attention, and sing the company song every morning before they turn on their PC's
As the site continues to grow it becomes really big, the sellers get pissed off due to lack of attention (customer service), and the rumblings of mutiny start. Eventually, the sellers leave and the site dies.
This hasn't happened to eBay ... yet, probably because it's supporters are now pros. OTOH, the new, free sites are being filled up with the amateurs selling gazillions of sports cards and pocket books. They don't experience the same joy as their forefathers, don't get the fast sells, and don't make the same profits (i.e. no more instant gratification).
Firstly, may I thank noveltynook for the praise, and I genuinely hope that you find at least a small degree of success in dealing on our site
Now to address RB's concerns. I can understand about how sites will get overrun and not be able to provide personalized support (in our first "frantic" days, I was answering an email out and two more would come in).
In order to combat this, we're continually developing our forums to allow users to provide each other with "user to user" support. This cuts out about 75-80% of support requests, because most of the questions that we get asked (such as noveltynook's question above regarding pricing) could be easily answered by users with a "community spirit".
We have a system where we elect "category moderators", who are users who are experienced in a certain category or area who volunteer their time to remove spam and unacceptable auctions from their category. These moderators operate under our watching eyes, just in case we get a "rogue" moderator who does something immoral such as removing a competitor's perfectly acceptable item. This will hopefully keep us from having to spend too much time "patrolling" our site.
Now to address the issue of such pressing matters as "yachting" which the owners of many websites have to deal with on a daily basis (). We make a living and pay the overheads of running our site, by selling things on our site. We've gotten where we are without corporate investment of any sort, so we're not obligated to make profits to appease stockholders.
For this reason, most of the money we'll make will be going back into our site.. Promotion, employing support staff when they become necessary, etc. We honestly have no intentions of having mercedes driving executives any time soon. On a personal note, if I hadn't had the workload of developing the site and providing support, I would have gone mad months ago - so I couldn't see myself "yachting" or anything silly like that.
Due to the fact that my wife and mother in law are both full time auction sellers, I can assure everyone that if I did anything that was detrimental to sellers, I would be hung drawn and quartered.
This is, in my opinion, probably as close to the "seller-run co-op site" idea (that's been floating around for some time now) as will ever get off the ground. I hope I don't start a debate about the coop idea, and I really wish them the best and I'd be happy to lend the knowledge I've gained from running an auction site for the short time I have (my personal well being would benefeit from such a site), but I honestly can't see it happening and remaining stable. So I like to think of us as a "compromise" between company and coop.
posted on March 6, 2001 02:55:14 PM
Hi Jamie... there's one thing that's always bothered me about Pootah... the first category listed on the front page is Adult & Erotica.
I understand the list is alphabetical, but IMO it's not exactly a good first impression.
Firstly, I meant absolutely no disrespect to your site. Your efforts are to be commended.
Now, to address your comments:
"we're continually developing our forums to allow users to provide each other with "user to user" support."
Good plan!
"who volunteer their time to remove spam and unacceptable auctions from their category."
This is a little scary. I consider myself an "expert" wrt to video tape. I could make a lot of enemies if I was given the power to halt the proliferation of video bootleggers who are getting rich on eBay, Yahooooo and possibly BidVille (if anyone ever starts buying there). As to being overseen by you, I have probably fogotten more about this stuff than you will ever know. It would be a constant battle between you and I ... kinda like the student telling the teacher how to teach.
"Now to address the issue of such pressing matters as "yachting" which the owners of many websites have to deal with on a daily basis (). We make a living and pay the overheads of running our site, by selling things on our site. We've gotten where we are without corporate investment of any sort, so we're not obligated to make profits to appease stockholders."
Just wait ... if you DO start bringing in the big dough, you'll be surprised at how fast this attitude will change
posted on March 6, 2001 03:49:59 PM
Greetings again
Joanne, I can understand your concerns in this respect. I'll see if I can find a way to move it to the bottom of the list when we do our "super duper upgrade" that's coming hopefully real soon.
Our eventual plan involves the "hiding" of the adult and erotica category on Pootah. We've formed the "AuctionCommunities Network", which after the abovementioned upgrade, will link Pootah and several other free websites together, allowing them to share user data, items, etc.
We plan on making the adult and erotica category on Pootah a little harder to get at, and trade this off to our adult content sellers by construction a 100% adult site that will effectively be a "mirror" of the adult section of Pootah. We'll promote this site the way anyone would promote an adult related website. With luck, we can hide the adult and erotica content from the eyes of everyone on Pootah, and not sacrifice sales and bid performance of our adult and erotica sellers (we believe in auctions for everyone firmly - so long as it's within local laws).
RB: I can understand your point about "overseeing".. Perhaps that was a bad term.. We don't require our moderators to report to us or anything, we simply keep an eye on them to make sure people are being treated fairly. We're yet to have a dispute with a moderator, and our whole motivation for the moderator system is that we acknowledge our moderators are more experienced than us (my brain would be about six feet round if I had the collective experience of all the "top" sellers online).
Also, with regards making enemies... We try to keep the moderators we select "hush hush", for that reason. Currently, users aren't notified when their auctions are removed (they're simply removed from the category, not deleted). Shortly after our upgrade, the system will notify a user when their item is deleted, but they will only be given a moderator "number", which is in no way traceable by them.
If they feel they've been treated unfairly, the will be able to fill out a complaint form, using the moderator number, and we'll be able to take it up with the moderator... Without the user ever knowing the identity of the moderator which deletes the items. We're trying to find a compromise between privacy and protection... Hopefully it'll work out well
Finally, I can last about a month without a workload before I start to feel the emotional effects. And you'd be surprised how low a priority money can be for some people. I'd be happy just to make a wage which fairly compensates my efforts, I have no interest at all in a yacht-mercedes-mansion lifestyle. If anyone catches me in 10 years time driving a Mercedes, please beat some sense into me with a fish
posted on March 6, 2001 06:49:26 PM
Thanks for your response Jamie, your plans sound great! And I LOVE the idea of your "AuctionCommunities", I'll be anxiously awaiting their opening
posted on March 6, 2001 06:52:59 PM"We've formed the "AuctionCommunities Network", which after the abovementioned upgrade, will link Pootah and several other free websites together, allowing them to share user data, items, etc."
AuctionCommunities isn't really open for business, but if you have ideas I would love to hear about them
Basically, we're trying to start a fair-market-ish network _without_ the corporate mentality. You know, join together smaller sites so that they grow together. The whole "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" deal.
At this stage we have plans for two "broad based" auction sites to be joining the network (of course, Pootah.. And another which wishes to remain nameless at this time), as well as several "start-up" niche sites which are going to be joining as well.
Our belief is that if we can make the niche sites as mirrors of the niche categories on the total system, we can market the niche site at users who are only looking for specific items. They don't have to wade through millions of items they don't want to see, which is the overall advantage of niche sites.
The disadvantage with niche sites is that users must have several different ID's to remember (because the odds of getting your favourite ID on all sites are kind of slim), and the general lack in traffic. We're hoping that by linking them together, we can get the good points of both types of sites, and the bad points will be negated by the fact that people won't be going to the site they don't like.
Furthermore, one login and password will work for the entire AuctionCommunities network. You log into any site using the same password. You keep your feedback (we're also including infrastructure to import ratings from any number of other websites too) accross the entire network.
We're hopefully going to have the whole thing working by wednesday next week. I had planned on finalizing the changes and migrating data from Pootah late tomorrow night, but I realise I still have far too much work to possibly meet this deadline. Also, I won't do the upgrade any later than thursday, because the weekend is our "prime-time" and I don't want to disrupt that (I know the headaches that Yahoo!'s weekend updates caused).
We're also going to be teaming the AuctionCommunities together with another small forum site, to hopefully provide friendly, unbiased, lightly-censored conversation.. As well as the "Seller Resource Center" which will eventually contain articles about selling on different sites (not limited to AC sites), and different selling techniques and stuff.
We have a whole bunch of great stuff planned for AuctionCommunities and it's sites, the big bottleneck is how quick we can get our ideas into web scripts As I said above though, we hope to have something the users can interact with by next week (existing Pootah ID's will become AuctionCommunities ID's so Pootah users needn't sign up for AC).
posted on March 7, 2001 04:02:05 PM
I have e-mailed Pootah, Jamie answered. I have posted questions in Pootah message boards, Jamie answered. I have read messages from Jamie in Yahoo Seller's Zone. I read messages from Jamie in AW.
I have come to this conclusion: There is NO ONE there but Jamie! If the phone rings and no one answers, it probably means that Jamie is in the men's room. (Maybe banging his head against the wall?)
posted on March 8, 2001 09:43:53 PM
Greetings Folks
My apologies for not answering sooner, I've been trying to get some motivation to get a good run at some of the new features I want to included in the next major upgrade. This will probably be our first real upgrade that actually denied people access to the server for any length of time (I'm hoping it'll be under an hour, but we'll see).
It's true, we don't have a huge staff here at AuctionCommunities (same place that runs Pootah basically). We're basically a staff of three, but I'm the one who does the coding and development on the site (Sabriena helps with coding, but I write really messy code that makes other people's heads spin, I don't blame her for giving up on it ). The thing is, looking at scripts for auction sites all day makes your head do strange things, so to take a break I wander around the different forums and answer people's questions.
Basically the three people here are me (in charge of coding and web development), Sabriena (feedback importing, some technical support, graphic development, and promotions) and Pandora (accounting, general seller experience). It might not sound like much but we get by, especially because the email support has slackened off a little (I only get about 20 emails a day instead of 20 every half hour ).
, but at least you felt that there was someone at the other end of your email pipe.
