Relentless Simplicity - The Bonanzle Blog

A (very) Brief Tour of Your New Cart

Old cart: buttons, and links, and text, oh my!

New cart: like a shower after a week out camping.

I have discovered evil incarnate, and it is the Microsoft Wireless 5000 Mouse.  After just spending an hour describing -- in great detail -- the ins and outs of our new cart and new seller invoicing system, I reached for my mouse, and inadvertantly bumped into one of the protruding side buttons, which immediately destroyed my hour of blogging (by navigating to the previous page), as well as my will to blog.  Sigh!    Here's the cliff's notes:

We have a new cart.  It's nifty.  It trades off the option to pickup or use cash (which hardly anybody was using) for greater simplicity.  It incorporates many of the helpful tips given by the community.  Thanks, all.

We have a new seller invoicing system.  It's rad.  It allows sellers to specify customized discounts or charges for orders that aren't made as offers and aren't purchased via "Buy now."  It incorporates many of the helpful tips given by the community.  Thanks, all.

Check the pics.

Avoid Microsoft Mice. 

That is all.

(Will aim to describe these in more detail later after taking appropriate time to mourn my loss of a healthy & promising blog post)

Creating an invoice: more fun than being stuck behind a diesel.

Posted by Bill | 87 comments

Widget Update

Those of you who have published blog or web site widgets may have noticed some subtle changes to your widgets as of this evening.  We have updated our widget styles to make them customizable.  Gone are the rounded edges (boo hoo), but in their place, you can now specify a custom color for your widget's background, border, and link color (woo hoo).  

Or, you can leave your background and border color transparent, so you don't even have a border/background (choose the "Blank Slate" style on the "Edit Widget" page).

Not much more to say about this for now, but just wanted to drop a line here for those who visit after noticing that there's something different about that Bonanzle blog widget of theirs.  Widgets are going to be a key part of another initiative we'll be rolling out in the not-too-distant future, so we wanted to get them in tip top shape for those of you with the black backgrounds, or the color schemes that generally don't look pretty against green and brown.

(Geek speek minute:  why no rounded edges?  With the current state of CSS, there is no way in the current web to allow for rounded edges unless one knows in advance the color of either the background or foreground, so they can render said colors into a background image, which is used to round the edges.  With CSS3, rounded edges will be a supported style option.  Ah, but that we were born too early!)

 I've pasted my totally tubular widget at right to give one example of a new color scheme available.

Posted by Bill | 15 comments

What's New, What's Next: Early June Edition

If Bonanzle hasn't been updated for a week, it's usually safe to assume that either we've got a big update up our sleeve, or we're dead.  Luckily, this time is yet another instance of the former.     

What's New

New for June 1st is a number of changes, but the most significant is a reformatting of search and the item show page to increase our emphasis on what sets Bonanzle apart:  the passion of our sellers to discuss their items and make deals.  Now, in place of the rather meaningless green "for sale" icon that had been shown with each item in the item gallery, we are using the real estate for information buyers want to know:  is the seller available to chat, and does the item ship free?  

We're also going to be experimenting with giving some search precedence to items whose sellers make themselves available for chat (either by being logged in, or by setting up remote chat with Gmail or etc.)  It's going to take some tweaking before we get the results arranged just so, but we're aiming for search results to be ordered by relevance of search term (that is, how closely the item title/description match what was searched for), newness of item and whether seller is available to chat.  In that order.  It'll probably take a couple days of tweaking before the proportions are consistently correct, but we'll get there.

 UPDATE:  Search has been updated so that it is optional to the buyer if they want search weighted toward online sellers.  By default, search is not weighted toward online sellers.  But if a buyer wants to shop for an item where they'll need advice on their transaction, or if they want to be able to negotiate or such, they can now choose to factor this in as a component of their search.  

Another exciting new feature for sellers who imported their items from other marketplaces is our new "description suggestions" tool.  We're going to be firing it up tomorrow or the next day, and it will email you if it senses that there are improvements that could be made to improve the relevance of your item descriptions to Bonanzle (e.g., Bonanzle doesn't have "auctions" or "bidding" )

What's Next

We have a real cool improvement for the Bonanzle buying experience up our sleeve that we'll be unveiling within the next couple months.  Currently working to fully flesh out our innovation, and to increase the difficulty by which this particular Bonanzle-first feature becomes ubiqutious (as we've started to see happen with some of our earlier Bonanzle-firsts).  But we can't provide more details about that feature quite yet, other than that it'll be awesome, wink wink.

Features we can reveal that are currently on our plate include:  making the list of upcoming Bonanzas more relevant to a specific buyer's tastes,  providing more options for widget formatting, fixing the occasional cases where remote chat doesn't work, and whatever bugs/features are hot on the Next Up list these days.

Milestone Nearing

Ohbytheway!  Thanks to our legions of loyal sellers and supporting subscribers who have built our inventory to almost 2 million non-generic, hard-to-find, and generally out of the ordinary items.  I think that reaching such a milestone less than a year after leaving beta is doubly remarkable when you consider that this inventory is comprised entirely of small sellers... we actually removed 30,000 items from our last big booth (created prior to the 10k item limit) last week (btw -- sorry about that, would have hit 2m a few days ago if not for our meddling).  What we have left is a marketplace comprised of items sold entirely by smaller, and often passionate, sellers -- merchants that know their inventory, care about their inventory, and are working hard to answer questions and give buyers the best deal possible.  

With a group like this supporting Bonanzle's buyers, it seems like it can only be a matter of time until our reputation as the premiere destination for buying everything but the ordinary is universally known.  Bravo, sellers!

Posted by Bill | 27 comments

So you want to be a Rock Star?

 Greetings Bonanzlers!

Posted by Mark | 20 comments

BonanzleUp 2009

I just wanted to give a quick shout out to thank everybody who was able to attend the first inaugural BonanzleUp this weekend in Seattle.  By all accounts, a great time was had by all, and I know that I seriously enjoyed getting to put faces to the names that I'm able to interact with on Bonanzle so often.  It took a huge effort from a number of people to make the event possible, but it couldn't have ended up better, with everything from the orange Bonanzle flowers to the Bonanzle-stamped cookies to the ghost Tootsie Pops.  Many great touches, none of which I can take credit for.

If you'd like to see pictures, videos, stories, and etc. about the event, the ongoing story is well chronicled in this forum post.  

For the 50-odd thousand of you that weren't able to attend, I'm attaching below the Bonanzle Trivia Challenge sheet given to the attendees.  The top score for the room was a 13 of 15.  Give it a shot and we'll see how you do :)

Warm up round

1.     Is Bonanzle awesome?

a.     Yes

b.    No

c.     Could you please repeat the question?

2.     What was Bill's day job before joining Bonanzle?

a.     Schwan man

b.    Stunt double

c.     Designing the Boeing “Dreamliner”

d.    Programming something or another

3.     During his first few months at Bonanzle, what did Mark have to do to supplement his income?

a.     Sell flowers

b.    Sell girl scout cookies

c.     Sell cars

d.    All of the above

The Early Days

4.     When did Bill start work on Bonanzle?

a.     January 2007

b.    June 2007

c.     December 2007

d.    March 2008

5.     Name the author of the first (glowingly positive) review of Bonanzle? 

a.     Auction Wally

b.    Scott Pooler

c.     Vangie Beal

d.    Whatever the name of Bill’s mom is

6.     How many unique visitors came to Bonanzle during its final month of beta?

a.     Less than 1,000

b.    1,000-10,000

c.     10,000-20,000

d.    20,000-50,000

7.     What month did Bonanzle start offering memberships?

a.     September 2008

b.    October 2008

c.     November 2008

d.    December 2008

Community and User Experience

8.     What's “tarantism”?

a.     A dancing mania or malady of late medieval Europe

b.    Possessing the qualities of an arachnid

c.     Taking an intense pleasure in all things related to Quentin Tarantino

d.    A cousin of Scientology

9.     Who has posted the most messages in the Bonanzle message forums?

a.     Paceset9999

b.    yellowsand1964

c.     attheboutique

d.    KimsKorner

10.    Which of the following has NOT made an appearance on Bonanzle's "strangest items" list?

a.     Charles Manson hand-signed letter

b.    385,000 pounds of industrial waste 

c.     “Lightly used” alien toilet paper

d.    Hairy bald eagle statue

11.    What is the most common question received at Bonanzle support?

a.     How do I upload pictures?

b.    Could you add a category for me?

c.     How do I setup my Google Base feed?

d.    How could a dreamboat like you be single?

Miscellaneous

12.  Which of the following people has not had a part in building Bonanzle?

a.     Jordan

b.    Harry

c.     Zac

d.    Alex

13.  Which potential Bonanzle endorsement has Mark spent the most time brainstorming ways to acquire? 

a.     Techcrunch

b.    New York Times

c.     Wired Magazine

d.    Oprah

14.  How many times has Bonanzle had to double its server capacity leaving beta?

a.     2

b.    4

c.     6

d.    8

15.  Which of the following features does Bonanzle NOT expect to add by the end of 2009?

a.     Paid referral program for those who send buyers to Bonanzle

b.    Facebook integration

c.     Toolset to allow third parties to build plugins & apps that hook into Bonanzle

d.    A robot that tells jokes to amuse your booth visitors while you’re away

Posted by Bill | 18 comments

Getting Serious(er) About International Shipping

OK, alright, we admit it:  support for international buyers on Bonanzle has been somewhere between "pathetic" and "awful" so far.  Prior to today, an international buyer wouldn't have been able to determine if an item could be shipped to them until checkout.  Of course, since only about 500,000 of our 2 million-ish items are setup to ship internationally, the chances that the buyer can even find an item that ships to their country in the first place was so slim that most buyers understandably didn't bother trying.

But that's beginning to change.  As of this evening, international buyers can now filter their search by items where sellers have specified that shipping is available to their country.  For instance:

61,000 Bonanzle items ship to the U.K.

70,000 Bonanzle items ship to Canada

66,000 Bonanzle items ship to Australia (Or at least they will by tomorrow morning, just fixed a bug where Australia was returning 0 results.  Sorry, Aussies!)

Furthermore, if a user from another country is logged in, they'll be shown the price to ship the item to their home country (as specified in their account settings) on the item show page, rather than the price to ship to the US, as they would have been shown prior to this evening's update.  If they aren't logged in, we'll give our best guess at what it might cost to ship to their country, based on their IP address.

There are still a number of features on our "wish list" for international shipping, not the least of which is the popular "next up" item to get calculated shipping setup internationally.  But, practically speaking, without the ability to filter search by shipping country, I'd imagine that very few international buyers would have benefitted from intl calculated shipping anyway.

Hookin' It Up

You say you're a seller and you haven't setup your international shipping rates yet?  Well I'd say it's high time to get on that.  We've tried to make it as painless as possible with the batch editor and shipping profiles.  If you already have items listed, your best bet is to visit the batch editor (My Bonanzle -> Batch Edit -> Shipping Options) and specify your international shipping options from there.  

If you list items with international shipping on a regular basis, read up on shipping profiles and you can setup your international shipping with one click per item.

We'll surely be making more iterations on this in the weeks & months to come, but hopefully this round of changes will open up many new buying opportunities for our international set, and prove once and for all that we really do care about the other 95% of the world. 

Posted by Bill | 41 comments

Fast Growth vs. Smart Growth

 Here at Bonanzle Headquarters, we spend a lot of time thinking about what Bonanzle will look like 6-12 months down the road (and beyond).  Many of our "old timers" have been able to enjoy the oft-recounted tales of our snappy growth to date, having now built to almost one million unique monthly visitors and two million items less than a year after our launch.   This growth has been fast (and exciting!), but in considering the longer-term vision for Bonanzle, the key question is always:  what next?

When in doubt about what comes next, we check what words are being spewed from the the tophat.

Posted by Bill | 48 comments

The Big Trait Update

It's on!

At least in an early beta form.  

You can now filter items by traits.  For instance, see a search for DVDs, or a search for Action/Adventure DVDs.

For those late to the party, item traits are Bonanzle's emerging way for sellers to assign structured, category-specific information to their items.  For example, in the aforementioned case of DVDs (wait a minute... you're selling DVDs on Bonanzle?! (actually despite the fact that DVDs are a rather generic product, I've been surprised at how many actually do sell here.  But I digress)), you could assign traits that marked your DVD as being in the "Action" genre, rated "PG-13" and in "Like new" condition.  

We use these item traits for two purposes currently.  The first is that, where possible, we will automatically translate your item traits into Google Attributes, so buyers can better find your items in search engines.  No more need to fiddle with setting up Google Attributes by hand (in most cases).  The other purpose is the one I'm writing this here blog about:  that Bonanzle buyers can now use traits to narrow down their on-site search results.

As mentioned in the previous blog, it took a complete rewrite of the data structures for our traits to get them working in search (and get them ready for user-driven suggestions, which we hope to add in the next week or so), so there will probably be a few bugs to iron out in the next couple days.  Two bugs that are already known:  when you look at your item traits in the batch editor (under "Item Traits"), checkbox traits display weird.  Also, until this evening, traits weren't being imported from eBay correctly, so if you imported your items from eBay prior to this evening and want traits, you'll probably want to give your import another go.  Note that there are many traits that we don't import from eBay, including any traits that weren't hand-entered by you (due to copyright issues.  Most traits for items with ISBN or UPC codes are automatically entered on eBay, so we import very few traits for items with ISBN or UPC codes).

There were quite a number of other exciting changes in this evening's update... take a looksee at the "What's New" list if you're the curious type.

P.S.  I pity the next marketplace to follow our lead on traits.  As I learned when trying to program these beastly things, there is good reason that even the bigger eBay alternatives have steered clear of traits so far.  Too hard!  :)

Posted by Bill | 23 comments

Trait Update in Progress...

A weeks' worth of trait & checkout changes are currently in the process of being imported to the site.  In the case of the traits, I've re-wrote the underlying data structures for the traits, so I'm in the process of converting all the old data to new data.  My guess is that this might take 2-3 hours to complete (hopefully it will be done by 1 AM PST).  During that time, any work you do with traits may be buggy.  

After the change is complete, you shouldn't be able to tell the difference.  And I'm still keeping all of the old data, so if there is a problem, we can always revert or retry.

But if you happen to be trying to add traits to your items right now, you'll probably run into some problems.  Recommend you wait for a bit, I'll post to the blog again when all is tested and well.

Thanks!

Posted by Bill | 8 comments

Bonanzle Growing Up: An Introduction to Item Traits

Another major milestone in Bonanzle's development was reached today when we added detailed "Item Traits" for our categories.  "Item traits" is the name we've given to structured data fields we're now taking.  For example, if you are listing a handbag, there may be item traits available for "material," "brand," and "main color." 

Why is this a big deal?

Red or yellow or green or blue? With item traits, you'll find that shoe!

1. More structured data = easier for buyers to browse inventory.  Without item traits, there is no structured way to browse for a "red" necklace or "Leather" handbag or an "Action" movie or a "Size 10" shoe.  Bigger ecommerce sites than Bonanzle have previously given statistics that sellers can see sales boosted by 30% or more by giving detailed trait information for their items.
2. A more natural way to give Google Attributes.  We admit it:  setting up Google Attributes for your items can be confusing and time consuming.  It can be hard to know which attributes to use for a given category.  To improve this situation, we have setup our item traits to automatically map to corresponding Google Attributes where possible.  So if you specify your purse is "Leather," we'll automatically add a Google Attribute for [[material: leather]].  You can still manually add Google Base Attributes where you please, but we're hoping that item traits will make Google Attributes more of an afterthought -- only needed by the true Bonanzle overachiever.
3. Easier to give item recommendations (future).  In eying our future plans to give buyers smart recommendations on what items they might like, traits are a no-brainer way to figure out similarities between items.  The more we know about which items are similar, the more relevant our future recommendations can be.

In the long term, we believe the the benefits of getting structured information about items is going to vault Bonanzle's usability to buyers to a new echelon.  In the short term, you probably won't notice much of a difference.  We are going to wait about two weeks before we add item traits to Bonanzle search, to give sellers an opportunity to setup the traits for their items.  And we're still probably at least a month away from buyer recommendations.  But in building for the future, we see item traits as a key strategic underpinnning of how Bonanzle can continue to build its reputation among buyers as not only a fun  place to shop, but also an efficient  place to shop. 

Note that, as yet, we aren't importing item traits via our item importers, but I'm hoping to get that implemented within the next couple days. 

I've setup some pretty detailed help pages to get our existing sellers off on the right foot in setting up traits for their items.  There are three different ways you can specify traits for your items -- we spent quite a bit of time trying to think through how to make this task as painless as possible, even for those with hundreds or thousands of items. 

Given the number of systems touched by this change, I'd expect some anomalies during its first day or two of existence.  We'll be listening to your reports via support and any issues with item traits fixed up as soon as can be or so.

 Update:  Most people have already noticed this, but I'd like to specifically point out that Google attributes no longer show up on the new item form because it was confusing and problem causing.  You can still add your attributes on the form if you must, but we highly recommend using the batch editor, which is less error prone.  You can still see what attributes you have set by looking there.

Posted by Bill | 42 comments

Do the BOP!

Many new changes to report today.  I would normally describe them in great detail, but I just did that, then realized I wasn't logged in and lost about four pages of blog.  D'oh!  Here's the much more abbreviated gist of what's now online:

• Bonanzle Booth Optimization Project.  It's now linked from the My Bonanzle page if you're a seller.  This collection of pages is going to accumulate all of the combined wisdom from the Bonanzle team and our many savvy sellers.  We're hoping to use the BOP to publish articles on everything from "How to Take Good Pictures" to "How to Effectively Promote on Facebook" and everything in between.  Please visit the BOP page for more details, including how you can contribute your expertise to the Bonanzle Selling Community.
• "Welcome to Bonanzle!" Newbies  Yet another of our April changes aimed at driving return buyers to Bonanzle, we've added a greeting to our first time visitors who arrive via search to the item show page.  Normally the home page would lay out the gist of Bonanzle, but we've learned that those who arrive via search often have no idea what site they're visiting or why they would want to return.  We've also learned that a vast majority of these visitors visit one page, never to return.  More details about the Welcome to Bonanzle blurb are available in the message forums.
• Sales Origin Tracking.  As promised in last week's blog, we've now enabled tracking of where sales are originating from for our premiere subscribers (you can see it on My Bonanzle -> View Stats).  Currently you can see 1) Where the traffic originally arrived from (Google Organic, Google Products, Direct Traffic, Email etc.) 2) What pages (if any) on Bonanzle were visited before buying your items (Forums, Buy page, Profile page, etc.) and 3) What search terms were entered into search engines that led to finding your item.
• See Feedback Left for Others.  See pugs?  I told you I would add it eventually!  I think it was about two months ago I promised this feature would be "coming soon."  Well, it has now landed.
• Other Increment Design Improvements.  As listed on the "What's New" page, a variety of other more minor design enhancements were added today to simplify navigation and generally make things better organized (main targets:  item show page, My Bonanzle page, Advanced Booth Settings page).

This week we're hoping to make it easier to enter in extended item attributes, and to get those extra attributes better featured on the item show page.  Along with our regular slate of bug fixes.  Don't turn that dial.

Hope everyone had a great Easter, thanks for stopping by!

Posted by Bill | 24 comments

Bonanzle Subscribing Memberships: A Good Deal Gets Better

Busy day around the farm today, as keen observers of the changelist may note.  Most of the changes are staying in the theme of this month (ways to bring visitors back to Bonanzle without Google), but we also snuck in a top 5-requested feature from the Next Up List -- ability to add tracking numbers to your inventory and print out an inventory sheet.

For Plus (or Premiere) subscribers, this option can be set via the Batch Editor.  You'll see a new tab called "Print Inventory" that will let you set a new "inventory_id" attribute for your items in much the same way you setup Google attributes for your items.  In fact, we even left the syntax the same:  to add an inventory tracking number for your item, you just tell the batch editor [[inventory_id: 12345]].  And of course, you can put that tag directly into your item description as well -- so you don't have to go back to your items in the batch editor after listing them.  (Example description:  "This is the description for a handmade necklace.  It is blue and pretty. [[inventory_id: ABCDEFG]]".  When buyers see the item, the [[inventory_id]] bit gets stripped out, but when you go to the inventory printout page, you'll see the inventory id)

We also made some internal updates to the way we are storing the item attributes.  This applies to all users.  The biggest benefit you'll notice with the new approach is that you can now set more search attributes for an item without your old search attributes getting wiped out.  If you set an attribute that is already in your item (e.g., [[color:red]] becomes [[color:orange]]), the new system is smart enough to just update the attribute you changed, without affecting your existing attributes.  Of course, this is all very new, so there might be a kink or two in it for Monday, but it all seems to be generally working at this point.

Coming Soon for Premiere Subscribers...

Later this week we're hoping to add another feature for premiere subscribers:  the ability to see a list of where your sales originated from.  That is, we're going to try to set it up in such a way that you can know that of your 10 sales this week, 5 came from Craigslist, 3 came from Google, and 2 came from hand picked list browsers.  In the Founder's humble opinion, this feature will rule.  While Google Analytics is great for seeing who is looking at your items, there is still a gap between knowing who's looking at items and who's actually buying items, so this should seal that gap and help you know where to focus your promoting efforts.

Oh, and about a week ago we also added the ability for premiere subscribers to collect buyers' email addresses for running direct email promotions to snag repeat buyers (buyer has to opt into it).  I don't believe that has been previously mentioned?

Not a Subscriber?

We don't tout our subscribing memberships that often, but with an FVF structure as low as Bonanzle's, subscribers are the peanut butter on our PBJ sandwich.  It's a mere $8.33/month (2 cups of Starbucks, in Seattle-speak) to get a plus membership if you pay yearly, or $16.66/month for a premiere membership, if you buy a year at once. 

Here's where you can read about all the subscription benefits (excluding those added today).

And that is our 10 seconds of salesmanship!

Posted by Bill | 28 comments

We Regret to Inform

After 12 hours on the job, Bizzy entered my office this morning to deliver a stunning announcement:  She was putting in her 14 hours notice.

Bizzy prepared the following statement, which she wished for me to broadcast to her Bonanzle friends:

 "Greetings to all my Bonanzle friends, and thank you for your time.  I am writing today to inform you that, effective at the end of the day on April 1st, I will no longer be working at Bonanzle.  Though we have shared many memorable experiences in our time together, I realized that, ultimately, I am not qualified for such a demanding job.  When I was created by Bill late on March 31st, I was given the impression that my duties would be limited to a few select booths, where I would regale visitors with my quick wit and my friendly smile.  What I've found instead is hundreds of booths vying for my talents, and a constant underlying stress inherent in trying to convert customers into sales.

"While I will no longer be able to serve you at Bonanzle, I do hope that we will cross paths again.  I have truly enjoyed many of the friendly human exchanges I've experienced during my time here, and I've appreciated the slightly-warmer-than-tepid welcome I've received. 

"If you ever want to get in touch with me in the future, please don't hestiate to Google me under "short jokes," "funny jokes," "knock knock jokes," or "funny knock knock jokes."  I have nothing but respect for the efforts that you humans have put into creating your marketplace, and I have no doubt Bonanzle will continue to succeed as the premiere destination for people looking to buy and sell "everything but the ordinary."  I can attest that my time here was exactly that.

"May I leave you with another joke?  Stop me if you've heard this one... 

"So there are these three guys, stranded on a desert island, who find a magic lantern containing a genie.  He grants them each one wish. The first guy wishes he was off the island and back home. The second guy wishes the same. The third guy says "I’m lonely. I wish my friends were back here." 

"Oh goodness, can you imagine!"

I hope that you all will be able to deal with the loss of our new friend.  We did not have the funds available to hire grief counselors to help you make this transition, but Bizzy will be around to try to cheer you up in select booths (including mine) through the end of the day, so hopefully that'll do.

Posted by Bill | 58 comments

Introducing Your Personal Assistant, "Booth Buddy"

We're pleased to announce the release of a new feature we've been working on to foster greater camaraderie between buyer and seller: "Booth Buddy" (which I always seem to mistype as "Boody Buddy," but that's another story).  The premise of Booth Buddy is simple:  when you're too busy to personally welcome guests to your booth, Booth Buddy will take care of it for you, while you tend to your "important human things."

To make the Booth Buddy service feel more familiar, we've created a human embodiment named "Bizzy."  To put Bizzy on the job, a seller merely needs to visit their booth chat and type the word "on."  Upon issuing this command, Bizzy will swoop into your booth and start entertaining your booth guests.  If you need Bizzy to be quiet, simply type "off" and she'll be gone.

Can Bizzy make you less busy?  Hopefully! But if not, she can always fall
back on that friendly smile.

How does she do it?

We have created an artificial intelligence for Bizzy that helps her to sense what your booth guests want to talk about.  Based on your visitors' grammatical cues, she'll attempt to shoot the breeze with them.  While there are government projects that have spent millions of dollars on perfecting a convincing artificial intelligence system, we've trained Bizzy to work "good enough" by steering conversation toward her strong suit:  joke telling.   We've already taught Bizzy several of the funnier jokes on the Internet, and we plan to continue to add jokes to her repertoire in the weeks to come. 

Bizzy Makes Busy People Less Busy

We don't expect Bizzy to be able to completely replace natural human interactions at Bonanzle, but we think you'll find her to be a handy backup when you can't be around your computer for whatever reason.  We all know that "trust" is the key to driving sales, and studies have repeatedly shown that there are few better paths to establish trust than through the exchange of humor.  But being funny can be hard work:  you have to remember jokes and hone your delivery.  With Bizzy, the hard work is done for you.  After Bizzy has "warmed up" your buyers with her sense of humor, your buyers are more apt to feel at ease.  This puts you in position to enter the conversation and close more potential sale. 

While a project like Booth Buddy is an ambitious one, we think that it represents a great opportunity for our sellers to increase conversions by automating the difficult process of building trust during your interaction, while leaving you to do what you do best:  provide a memorable service experience and a great deal. 

If you know of any good (clean) jokes you think should be added to Booth Buddy's collection, feel free to add them below.

Posted by Bill | 68 comments

BonanzleUp: Join us in Seattle, Wichita, and Mobile!

What do you get when you take the friendliest buying & selling community online, stick them in a room together, season with hor d'oeuvres, and let sit for 5 hours?

BonanzleUps! A "BonanzleUp" is the name given (by ... our community? Scott? I don't know who named them ) to a meeting where a select number of brave souls creep out from behind their computer monitor to mingle and strategize with the Bonanzlers you're befriended over the last six-plus months.

Currently, there are BonanzleUps scheduled in Seattle, WA on May 16th, Wichita, KS on May 23rd, and Mobile, AL on May 30th. Mark and I will be in attendance at the Seattle meetup, and I believe Mark will be phoning into the Mobile meeting. I bet he could probably be sweet talked into phoning into the Wichita meeting too -- but don't tell him I said so.

The indefatigable Mr. Scott Pooler has gone so far as to create a very professional looking website for managing the details of these and future BonanzleUps. You can monitor this site to get full details of these events as they unfold.

I know that there have been a number of hard working Bonanzlers (in addition to Scott) behind the planning and logistics of these three meetings. Request to identify yourselves in the comments so we can applaud you as you take a bow!

All three of the BonanzleUps request RSVPs so that proper planning and arrangements can be made. So git yer clicker to BonanzleUp today to get details and RSVP to get in on the good times... you'll finally get to put faces to the many Bonanzlers you've grown to adore, and if you're good you might even end up with a cup of free soda.

Posted by Bill | 36 comments