Power Sellers Unite

elliemay · Joined: 26 Jul 2007 Posts: 1259

At least a little bit of advertising...

http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/06/smbusiness/ebay_alternatives.fsb/index2.htm

I'm having alot more traffic at my auctions since the ebay fallout. I've had 3 people find me on google. They signed up and bought from me. I'm encouraged by this. I am exploring all of the other sites too but I'm going to put the bulk of my items on Bidville for now.

Are any of you seeing more hits this week?

Justjoansetc · Joined: 22 Nov 2005 Posts: 275

Interesting article, and thanks for sharing.
I have all my items at Bidville with a few here or there just to direct people to Bidville.
Sales have been good of late, but not sure it's E's duh, or not, but would be nice to see buyers and sellers at Bidvile.

CuFF

More than 350,000 sellers are registered on Bidville, but 25,000 active accounts provide most of the site's 1 million listings, Hoffman said.

This statement, the only statement re: BV in the article is somewhat telling... If more than 350,000 Sellers have registered at BV, yet only 25,000 are active, it indicates that a very large percentage of Sellers tried BV and decided not to sell there.

Every single time that BV's had the opportunity to capitalize on ebays failure nothing has been done by management to promote or welcome ebay's displaced Sellers. It took about three instances of BV management's failure to react before ebay Sellers stopped swarming BV. Unfortunately, the one's who decided to stick around eventually found that CS is unresponsive to Sellers needs.

In another example of stupidity, current management welcomed a flood of Yahoo Sellers to BV by closing the community center. BV management was/is unresponsive, and they cut off Seller communication. In fact, all communication is cut off and management hasn't bothered to communicate with its Sellers in nearly a year and a half. The only communication has been to post a message on the Home page last summer about a security issue. Here it is...

Dear Bidville Members:

The Bidville site is experiencing a system’s issue regarding credit card processing for registration, random amounts and credit card payments. We are aware of the issue and expect this to be resolved by Wednesday July 11th. We apologize for the inconvenience and will keep you posted on the issue and resolution.

Guess what? It's happening again :!: If you click on the Truste icon displayed on BVs Home page you will see:

www.bidville.com IS NOT A VALID TRUSTe MEMBER WEB SITE

The log-in page is displaying an invalid Thawte certificate.

This is exactly the same situation that existed last summer when people were getting double-billed. The system was compromised then, and, it's compromised now. Security seals exist for a good reason. Some have argued that other sites exist where the log-in page is not secure, however, those sites don't have your credit card information on file like BV does.

The uBid banner seems to be gone from BVs home page. Have they abandoned the site, or have they finished directing members to uBid? Since that seemed to have been the prime objective what's going to happen now?

Justjoansetc · Joined: 22 Nov 2005 Posts: 275

My goodness are we having a bad day !!
I don't have all these problems that you seem to know about.
Interesting you don't sell there or buy there but sure like to down the site.
CS replys to any inquiries I might have and Bidville runs smoothly for me.
Hope where ever you are selling you do well at.

PatchDog · Joined: 28 Feb 2007 Posts: 3735

I was thinking about Bidville at one time. Never tried it though because of the 10 cent Gallery Fee. While it has always been cheaper than eBay was, most sites offer free gallery.

Other than that, it looks like a good site.

mogansportscards · Joined: 29 Jan 2008 Posts: 31 Location: Lancaster, Ohio

We have sold on Bidville under user id Angela&Josh'sCards for almost 7 years now. It is a once great site that has gone down hill rapidly the last couple years. We still list there, as it is a very user friendly site for listing and we still love it regardless, but we had high hopes for that site for a long time, and frankly, those hopes have diminished. The boards were closed due to immature, petty postings, and other than that it has seen little attention from it's owners since Ubid took over. We will still post there, and still make a sale once in a while, but it is just not as active as it once was and could be again in the future if they owners would just put some advertising into it like we were promised oh so long ago. What better time to do that than now, when everybody is threatening to leave Ebay?

Justjoansetc · Joined: 22 Nov 2005 Posts: 275

I have a lot of google alerts for different things I've listed or bidville it's self. And of late seeing a lot of Bidville showing up on my alerts.
I have been getting a lot more action on my listings of late, but I'm also posting to a lot of yahoo groups and google groups and that's helped business a lot..

CuFF · Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 11:53 pm Post subject:

The site is good, it's the management that sucks. On 6-13-07 there were 348 open stores. Now, there are 267. Anyone who doesn't see that as an indicator, or problem, just isn't looking.