Bonanzle- the new eBay?

Today I wanted to talk about a growing alternative to eBay. The website is called Bonanzle (website: Bonanzle) and it was created in the summer of 2008. I discovered them last year out of an AARP article (the book was for my mother, not me!) when I was trying to sell things for profit. Everything looked good to try out so I made an account. I have been a member with them for a year and I wanted to let you know if you should use them or not compared to eBay. First off, I'll list some pros and cons about them and then give a detailed description of each bullet.

Pros:

• Free and easy to start up.
• No listing fees
• Can load up to 4 pictures per item
• If the item sells, they will only charge you $1-$3 as final selling fee.
• Awesome forum to meet new friends!
• It's like having your own online store!
• You can have a certain amount of percent taken off your merchandise!
• Your products will remain there until you take them down from your booth.
• More than one payment option (besides PayPal)

Cons:

• As with anything, you need to generate traffic to it in order to sell
• Sometimes if you're not selling, will probably do games on the forum to get someone to buy from you.
• There is more sellers there than buyers.
• It may take days, weeks, even months or years to sell something.

So, the pros first: It's wonderful to see that they don't charge you for selling your products with them plus it only takes about 10 minutes to set things up. I was excited to see that there was no listing fees. No listing fees! Hot dog! Plus, it was awesome to see that you could upload more than one picture and not get charged like eBay does. Another good plus is the final offer fee. If the item sells for less than $1,000, you hardly get charged anything! Plus you have the option of having the FOF taken immediately after the sale or at the end of the month (sort of an I.O.U).

Now Bonanzle lets you sell all of your items in one go. It's called a booth. It's similar to an online store. Everything is showcased to the customer at one time so if they find more than one item that they needed in your booth, you make more profit instead of a customer going somewhere else for the product. Neat, huh? It's very simple to take care of plus you can design your booth any way you want.

The forums are excellent places to meet new friends and find potential customers. To be honest, the majority of sellers on Bonanzle are people who used to sell on eBay but once eBay's prices got too high and/or eBay ticked them off, they left and found other places to sell, Bonanzle being one of them.

Another thing that got people to Bonanzle is the option of getting paid without necessarily using PayPal. Some of the sellers were scammed by PayPal so Bonanzle offers payments of credit card, check, cash, Google Checkout, and PayPal. Also, there is no time limit as to how long your products can remain in your booth. If it doesn't sell, the product is still there next week and so on. With eBay, if you listed a product, it had to sell otherwise you lost out on your listing fee. Not so with Bonanzle.

The last bonus is that you can host a "bonanza" in your booth. A Bonanza is a one day sale that can last between 1-3 hours. Basically the website promotes that you are having an upcoming sale (a bonanza) which leads traffic to your site. You can choose to have a 5 to 95% off sale in your booth. The more higher the percent off, the more sales you're more likely to have. The downside to this is you can only do this once a month.

On to the cons: With anything online, you have to market it to the best of your ability. Bonanzle does give you tools to do this. Blog about it, Twitter it, Facebook it, add lines at the end of your e-mails about it, etc. The biggest tool they offer is Google Base. It the place where you can upload your booth items and have them show up in Google Products searches. It can also tell you daily which products are getting the most clicks and impressions. Even with all this help, you still might not get a sale.

Another con is that there is too many sellers on the site and not enough buyers. With eBay, it's a global traffic house. You can list an item but it has a good chance of being sold without having to make friends with the customer. Not so at Bonanzle. Sure, you might luck out with a few sales but mostly everyone there is a seller. You won't make too much profit because everyone wants you to buy from them first! No customers purchasing = no profit.

That leads me to the games in the forums. Sometimes there is games in the forums that let you purchase a product from another booth with the promise of the other booth to buy from you. It's like tit-for-tat. I didn't like the idea of it because I wanted someone to buy products from me and not have to shell out my own money in return. That's a loss!

The last con is that you're not guaranteed to make huge sales from them. I have been with them for a long time and I have not made a sale. Not one at all. I would go to the forums, put my site in traffic exchanges, talk about it all day long, and still not a sale. You can check out my booth here: Cajun Shares.

My opinion: Try it at your own risk. I'm not saying that they are bad; it's just that eBay offers more traffic than what they can offer. Now in defense, Bonanzle has more and better features for their sellers. Try them and let me know what happens for you. Although I failed with their system, this just might be what you are looking for as an alternative to eBay. Bonne chance!

Until tomorrow,
Miracle Reviews