Relentless Simplicity - The Bonanzle Blog

New Improvements Available for Voting

I've completed a sweep of the recent improvements suggested to us by our many sage users, and have added many of them to the "Next Up Improvements" page for your voting pleasure. While we have our next couple weeks already scheduled out, we'll be keeping an eye on this list later this month to see which features are most popular so we can get the buggers online. Thanks for your input! P.S. The current most voted feature (add optional shipping insurance) is one of the next todo items on our list.

You Wonder: What Happens When We're Huge?

"If I'm a low-volume seller, what happens when Bonanzle grows to a million daily visitors? Are my sales going to get diluted by high volume sellers that will arrive on the scene?" Have you wondered these questions? You certainly wouldn't be alone -- these are key questions to consider when determining whether it's worth it to invest your time to make Bonanzle your new home. I'd like to address these issues directly in this blog, to try to help dispel some possible misconceptions about what our continued growth will mean to you.

Like a sundae, it can't hurt to try Bonanzle
a little bigger.

I'll start with the bad news: it's going to take a whole lot of blabbing to answer questions as important as those. When I sent Mark my rough draft ("Getting huge a problem? Fuggedaboutit!!!") he insisted I provide "more details." So grab your beverage of choice and settle in, cuz this entry is going to be a little longer than usual. The most common concern I've heard from our sellers is that when Bonanzle gets huge, the high-volume power sellers will move in and make it more difficult to find items from smaller sellers. I think that this concern is particularly important for many sellers because of recent moves by That One Other Place that tend to give high-volume sellers preference in search results. There are several reasons I think this won't be a problem at Bonanzle, but in the interests of leaving you time to eat your supper after reading this, I'll choose three:

It isn't our goal to become the next Amazon. High volume sellers tend to be commodity (electronics, new books/dvd, computer) sellers, and commodity sellers already have plenty of great places to sell (Amazon being our personal favorite). Bonanzle's target audience is buyers and sellers of non-ordinary items, and those sellers are simply less likely to have a 50,000 item inventory. Our goal is to build a marketplace where the most active and passionate sellers can be the most successful sellers, regardless of their booth size.
More items available means more buyers. The bigger a marketplace gets, the more buyers learn to expect they'll usually find what they are looking for at said marketplace. Thus, the bigger a marketplace gets, the higher the ratio of buyers to sellers. Because Google has approximately a billion kajillion items searchable, more buyers use Google to find items than any other site. Yet, despite the immense inventory of items on Google, there are still plenty of Google buyers sent to Bonanzle sellers. Extrapolate to a smaller scale, and you can understand that more items on Bonanzle equals more buyers on Bonanzle, and that's great for everybody.
At Bonanzle, buying is about more than finding the lowest price. Our most successful sellers are those that are posting messages in the forums, chatting in their booths, creating hand picked lists, hosting Bonanzas, and tagging favorite items/booths. All of these social features increase a seller's visibility and trustability to buyers. Thus, sellers who are involved in the community will always have the upper hand at Bonanzle.

So, being huge won't be a bad thing. Dare we try to take this a step further and declare it may actually be a good thing? Getting huge means more folks at Bonanzle who will share your interests, more people who will leave nearby you, and ultimately, more great people to meet and share with. As you can read in Vangie's sneak peak of "Bonanzle in 2009," some of the features we're most excited about adding are features that make it easier to find buyers and sellers who share your interests. No matter what kind of items you like and where you live, we want Bonanzle to be a place where you'll many find others who share your passions. These people will naturally become your most reliable buyers, sellers, or both. Also, the more people that use Bonanzle, the more resources we'll have available to make greater investments in advertising the site to draw in buyers. Your grassroots efforts have taken Bonanzle to incredible heights so far, but combining those grassroots efforts with money spent on marketing efforts can only help to move your merchandise faster. I want our sellers and buyers to rest assured that we have done our best to think through the issues that will present themselves as the site grows. Our core values are the same as they have been since we had 100 sellers: we want to build the most upbeat, simple, and fun marketplace you'll visit. We want to take the friction out of buyer/seller interactions. And we want to do it with as few rules as we can get by with. Is it possible to accomplish all those objectives with a million people visiting per day? Man, heck if I know. Seems like it should be. But there's only one way to find out for sure!

Hand Picked Lists Expired Early

While doing some routine maintenance to the Bonanzle database this evening, there was an unexpected error that caused hand picked lists created in the last week to expire early (i.e., now). Though the lists are supposed to expire after two weeks anyway, our apologies to those who created lists recently and had them disappear. That sucks. The good news is that one of this evening's changes was to make lists even more deeply indexed into the main search for the site, so when you create your next list, you'll get even higher billing in normal search results (specifically, if the searcher is looking for an item that is in your list, the search will now look for that -- in addition to the title, subtitle, and emphasis of the list). Plus, since the lists give extra weighting to newer lists over older ones, this is a golden opportunity to get your list featured prominently, with so little competition from other lists :) For the record, we would normally be able to restore a database error like this with the frequent database backups we make, but in a cruel cosmic twist, the database backups had also been messed up for reasons that go beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice to say, the backups have been fixed, and I suppose in some sense it is a good thing that if a weird collection of errors like this had to happen, at least it affected data that was understood to be non-permanent anyway... All items, users, offers, and etc. were unaffected by this glitch. Hope everyone is having a fun and safe holiday season!

Indulgent Snow Day

I dunno about the weather around the country for the rest of you, but up here in the Puget Sound we are going through some of the coldest weather on record, complete with two snow storms that have already happened and a third one scheduled to touch down this weekend. I've always been a big fan of the snow day, not only because snow is fun to walk through and play in, but because it signals a completely unscheduled break from work and the everyday routine for those who can't drive to work. We need this! Of course, since my daily commute is all of about 15 steps, it's a little hard to explain to "the boss" that I can't make it into work today. But I've kept the "snow day" spirit alive anyway, by taking a break from my usual todo list and instead working on the features that I have really been wanting to add. Naturally, since they're the features I've been wanting to put in, I'm pretty excited about them, so I thought I'd share:

Switching between pages in booth no longer refreshes page. What does that mean? It means that A) it's faster to browse through big booths, and more importantly B) if you're chatting in a booth, you won't have to refresh your chat when you move to a new page. And C) it just looks cool, to me :)
Email, blog comments, and hand picked lists now have same formatting options as forums. That is, smileys now register as smileys, and you can use bold, italics, and pictures and stuff. I hope to post a help page about the site wide formatting rules tomorrow.
Doing an item search now searches for users and hand picked lists as well as items. If a user's name or the words in a hand picked list match the term you search for, it will get highlighted at the top of the item search. Observe.

Of course, even with the snow, it wasn't all about what I felt like doing today. I also added the most highly requested feature on the "Next Up" list: you can now determine the price for calculated shipping items from the items' page. If you're logged in, it will use your zip code to calculate. If you're not logged in, it will ask your zip code and use that. Hope you enjoy the new stuff. Looks like it's going to be another snow day tomorrow, I wonder what would be most fun to add next...! Late Night Update! I just decided the next fun thing to add, and I added it. But I'm going to leave it as an Easter egg for some sleuth to uncover. I'll give you one hint: it'll help with your business cards.

Help Us Test New Server? (UPDATED Tues Eve)

Update 12/16/08 Tuesday: Going to take a first stab at upgrading main server to this new one at 9 PM PST so I can watch it under some somewhat heavy load before tomorrow morning (when it will be under heavier load). Apologies if things get weird this evening. Or tomorrow. There will probably be a stray bug or two here or there, but we'll stamp them out as quickly as possible. Original post: If anyone has time to blow this evening, take a minute to stop by our test server: http://dev.bonanzle.com/blogs/Thanks_for_helping_us_test_ We are planning to upgrade the underlying software that runs Bonanzle, but it has required a lot of changes that could potentially break things, so we could use a hand putting the new software through its paces before we put it up live. For the curious, this new software won't have any noticeable impact when we do move to it, at least in the short term. It incorporates more than a years' worth of changes to the underlying engine that runs Bonanzle (Ruby on Rails) -- ultimately this upgrade will make it much easier for us to internationalize the site and fix the time zone issues with Bonanzas, amongst other things. But in the near term, our main goal is just to get it running and be no worse off than we are now! :) Thanks for any assistance ya'll.

Warning! Possibly More Addictive than Tagging...

While completing my Bonanzle holiday shopping this year, I realized that with as many great items as have been posted here (almost half a million! w00t!), it can sometimes still be hard to browse to the exact item you might be looking for. Thus, I've spent the last couple days mulling over some new ways to browse, and today I went ahead and added my favorite of the new browsing possibilities.

Make your favorite items known!

Fair warning: I think this new way to browse could be more addictive than tagging, which is saying something, because when tagging was added to the site I spent way too much time browsing random booths for taggable items. The new browsing method is called "hand picked lists." It is fairly similar to Etsy's "Treasury" and similar features that may exist at other sites. The idea is that you can create a list with a title, subtitle, optional category and optional emphasis. To create your first list, visit My Bonanzle -> Buying Activity -> Hand picked. Then you browse the site on the lookout for items that fit into your list. Or maybe you already browsed the site, thinking about what items would make for a good themed list, then you created your list. That would probably be the smarter way to do it. But one way or another, you have to hunt down 15 items that fit into the theme of your list. To get an idea of what it looks like, you can check out Bonanzle's first hand picked list, which I created tonight. Its emphasis is stuff for guys -- mostly because my dad and brother always give me the most trouble when I'm holiday shopping, and I figured others might find the same? I haven't had a chance to create any help documentation on hand picked lists yet, but here are the key points to keep in mind:

Lists expire after two weeks. This keeps fresh inventory showing up on the lists.
Each user can create a maximum of three lists. In the near future, there will probably be a cap on the overall number of lists (of a few hundred), since no one is probably going to have the time to browse 500 lists.
There is no way to "delete" an item from a list yet, but if you add more than 15 items, you can shuffle the item you don't want seen below the first 15 items and it won't show up on your list. Once you create your list and start adding items to it, you'll see what I mean by "shuffling items."
Your lists can only include other sellers' items. This encourages people to get out and explore the site. You can always ask a friend to include some of your booths' items in their list if you want to get featured too.
Lists are ordered via a secret formula on the main "Hand Picked Lists" page (now the second choice after "Categories" on the buy page). The sooner you setup your list, the less competition you'll have for top ranking!

Hope this helps everyone get a good start on what I think is going to become one of the most fun ways to shop Bonanzle. Let us know if you have any trouble creating your hand picked lists -- it still has a couple rough edges right now, but will get ever-prettier over the next couple weeks.

What's New & Next

My how the holiday season flies by when you're fixing bugs! All sorts of developments have been happening lately and I've gotten a bit behind in announcing them... so let the catchup begin!

New Features & Bugfixes of Significance

Checkout 2.0. Mark has been ...ahem... politely informing me for the last month that many sellers have hoped that we might take some steps to make checking out easier. They are finally getting their way, with more than 10 small and large checkout improvements put into place this evening. Some of the more significant improvements include: removing one of the three screens (shipping) from checkout for repeat buyers offers; clarifying the payment screen; eliminating the need for buyers to choose between Paypal or GC on the first cart page; and calculating shipping based on the offer's shipping location (rather than the user's home location). I'm hoping to soon squeeze in a couple more improvements still, like a custom invoicing system, but these first steps should be a fine start for an easier & faster buying experience.
HTML is default. One of our more common feature requests was to make it so that when new buyers visited the site they'd see the seller's listings in HTML when possible. It has now been made so.
Billing screen improvements. Not only was the Bonanzle fees page ugly, but it was also confusing and it failed to do some pretty basic things (like list past fees paid). It's gotten a face lift, and soon will have the option of automatic billing added so you don't have to remember to visit it every month.
Remote chat improvements. All four chat clients (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN Messenger and AIM) are now available. Sometimes. Sometimes MSN and AIM still go on vacation ('tis the season!), but we're certainly drawing closer to having them work regularly.

Coming Soon to a Marketplace Near You

More checkout improvements, like those listed above.
Automatic billing and optional enrollment in affiliate program (drives traffic to your items from bloggers and other sites) for those signed up with automatic billing. More details to come.
Hopeful unveiling of that one plan to get a thousand more buyers per day injected into site (in 1-2 weeks?)
More social features, when Bill gets to choose what he wants to add.

A Word of Caution

USPS has been quite the dullard lately when trying to calculate shipping rates -- sometimes taking long periods to calculate shipping, sometimes not calculating rates at all (I've checked on our end, and all is well in the request we make to USPS). In cases where shipping can't be calculated, buyers can still make an offer to seller, but can't buy items immediately, since USPS won't tell us what shipping price to charge. Tales of woe in trying to use even USPS' own site lately are well chronicled (on our forums and elsewhere), so especially during this busy holiday season, I'd recommend flat rate shipping prices (or UPS) if it is possible. I'll be continuing to monitor the availability of the USPS services over the next couple days to see if it improves, but lately their availability has been quite spotty indeed.

Congratulations to November Referral Winners!

Watch them go!

User Name	Referred Users Count	Their Awesome Booth	Gift Certificate Value
knkracing1	190	Legos Plus	$200
KimsKorner	142	KimsKorner	$100
Cindy'sCloset	67	Cindy'sCloset's booth	$25
Carolyn	25	Carolyn's Booth	$25
thetlcshoppe	16	The TLC Shoppe	$25
Alilbirdy2	16	Digital Designs and More	$25

Thanks for spreading the word guys and gals! You're way more popular than me, Mark, or any of our friends. I applaud you for that. Bravo. Contest results are now verified, please email support@bonanzle.com to arrange for help in checkout when buying your Bonanzle loot.

The Ascent Continues

Thanks to all the buyers and sellers, new and old, who have told their friends and customers about their new home on Bonanzle! Traffic continues to grow daily -- we're now consistently averaging more than 10,000 unique buyers and sellers visiting per day. You continue to write the story of one the most successful grass roots marketplaces ever created, and we thank you all for your total radness.

Cyber Monday Deals Abound!

A hearty welcome to all ye Cyber Monday shoppers! Today is undoubtedly the best day of the year to get unparalleled prices on some of the coolest and most unique items available at Bonanzle. This quick post will get you started with a couple quick hints to find the best deals and coolest items up for sale amongst a bounty of great choices. To start, check out this forum thread stock full of Cyber Monday coupons to use for your shopping. Wouldn't you rather receive a one-of-a-kind item hand picked for you this holiday instead of another generic book, CD, or gadget? Bonanzle now has almost half a million items that serve as both great gifts and great start conversation starters. Take a look around and see what you'll find! Here are a few links that you'll want to scope out to get started: Exceptional Items List Today's Bonanzas (Limited Time Sales!) Items Arranged by Category Browse by Booth The Master Coupon List Happy holiday shopping!!

Cyber Monday Sneak Peek: Coupons! (UPDATED)

Saturday Night Update: Coupons are now online. You can set them up by visiting Sell -> Advanced Options and then filling out the area that says "Coupons" (near the bottom of the page). Don't forget to click the "Save All Options" button when your coupon is filled out. I have run it through a fair number of tests locally, but I don't rule out the possibility their might be another kink or two in it. That's why it's going up the day BEFORE Cyber Monday :) If you find any issues with it, report them to support@bonanzle.com and we'll aim to get them worked out by Monday. But hopefully all will be hunky dory. Oh, I also ran a test to verify that you CAN put spaces in the coupon code you use. Original Post Follows... Just wanted to give those of you who are getting ready for "Cyber Monday" a quick heads up about a new feature that will be going online at Bonanzle on Sunday morning: booth coupons. Many of the savvier sellers have noticed that there's nothing buyers like more than feeling like they're getting a good deal on items, and in economic times like this, buyers' focus on price has never been greater. Thus, starting Sunday, you'll be able to specify booth coupons that give sellers a discount on items that they buy from your booth. I'm writing about it now in case you want to get a head start on advertising your coupons over the weekend. Here is the basic rundown of how coupons will work:

A coupon is an alphanumeric code of your choosing that can give buyers either a percentage discount or a dollar discount on all items they buy from your booth. For example, I could create a coupon with the code "BHARDINGDISCOUNTZ" that gives users 10% off all items in my booth. When the user goes to checkout, they have the option to enter a coupon code for items in my booth. If they enter in BHARDINGDISCOUNTZ, the price of all their items (before shipping) is discounted 10% (so if they were buying $100 of stuff, they get $10 off). If I have "buy now" setup, they don't even have to send me an offer, they can just buy the items immediately for $90 plus shipping.
Alternately, I could create a coupon that gave anyone $5 off of items from my booth. But you want to be a little careful with a coupon like this, since if they bought one item that cost $3, they would get the item for only the cost of shipping. There isn't yet a way to specify that a coupon is only valid with certain items, so at this point, flat rate discount coupons are probably only for sellers with exclusively expensive items.

Anyway, that's the idea. You can create as many coupon codes associated with your booth as you want and give different coupons different discount rates. You can delete a coupon at any time, so you could create a coupon on the morning of Cyber Monday and delete it that evening. If someone made an offer to you during the day, the offer would still reflect the coupon they used. A user can only use one coupon per transaction. In the future, coupons will surely be given more option (such as the ability to specify which items a coupon is valid with), but for now this should be a good beginning to a powerful promotion tool to boost your holiday sales. In response to inevitable questions: the limit on coupon code length is about 200 characters, and I believe that you can have spaces in the coupon code, but I haven't tried it yet, so if you want to be on the safe side it'd be best to choose a one-word code for the time being.

Bonanzle Nominated as Top eBay Alternative: Your Turn to Vote!

Update: Bonanzle gets a quick mention on Fox News thanks to our plucky supporter, Mr. Auction Wally! Check him out, sounding all smart about what to sell! Original Post Bonanzle was recently nominated for the Small Business Computing 2009 awards as the best eBay alternative! We're up against some very stiff competition in the likes of Wigix, eCrater, and... (gulp) Etsy. But luckily for us, the users choose a winner... that means YOU get a say! http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/biztools/article.php/3787256 We'll probably also mention this in our next newsletter as we send it out, but why not get a jump on the competition and vote for Bonanzle today? Being nominated for this award is a very exciting honor!

In Other News...

Have you checked the Bonanzle assets page lately? Check out some of our new assets available for you to promote Bonanzle in the message forum, blog, or web site of your choice!

Many thanks to our artistic Bonanzlers, kayceestudios (creator of the holiday graphics) and wahm (creator of the "check out my stuff" graphic). Take a bow, ladies!

Enjoying the Road to 10,000

As many of you have recently noticed, this morning Bonanzle had its 10,000th user (Smits901) sign up. This feels like a pretty big milestone to reach on the path to establishing Bonanzle as the top marketplace for buyers and sellers looking for everything but the ordinary. Just to get a sense of how far we've come and how quickly we've gotten there, consider our page views per week since the beginning of September: Small wonder that we have to upgrade our servers practically every month! In September, we were handling about 200,000 page views per week. This week, we'll handle more than 1 million page views -- and possibly as many as a million and a half with post-Thanksgiving bargain hunters. Of course, page views is only one of many different metrics we could use to prove the impact that your grass roots efforts have had on quickly making Bonanzle a major player amongst online marketplaces. Nearly every day is a new record for daily sales, and it is all the direct result of so many of you, working in concert, to bring your buyers and friends with you to Bonanzle. For the "old timers" who were around the site in August or September, it has been quite a sight as the message forums have grown from averaging 50 new posts per day to now more than 1,000 posts every single day. Pretty incredible stuff. Bonanzle has always been about combining the sum of many parts to create something big. So it's only fitting that we'd use this commemorative occasion to thank those who have given us the parts we need to get to 10,000.

Thank You, in General

I was out with a friend of mine for dinner the other night when he told me about a web site he was thinking about starting. I would probably get in trouble if I said the exact idea for the site, but the general idea was for a marketplace that would use some creative technology ideas to stand out from the competition. When he told me the idea, my first thought was "Great idea. Now where will the community come from?" There is something indescribable about what brings the right people together at the right time to create an online community you want to be a part of. It happens so rarely. I would be lying if I said that I understood exactly what the magical "thing" is that draws the right people in, but clearly, Bonanzle's early users had that "thing," and they've brought their friends along with them. What we've watched happen since is that the upbeat personalities stick, and most of the "other" personalities slide away like rain off the windshield (to use a Seattle analogy). The result of putting all the right people together in one place? Active booths and message boards chalked full of do-gooders who make new buyers and sellers feel at home from their first clicks. A sense that we can build a place where everybody starts with the benefit of the doubt. It sounds easy, but it's seldom accomplished at any kind of large-to-medium scale online, because I think it takes the right seed to grow into the plant you're after, and that seed is hard to come by.

Thank You, Specifically

A short list of people who Bill thinks are awesome follows:

Great question, Earthling. Let me see if I can help!

Subscribing Members. I don't think that Mark and I could work on Bonanzle for so many hours per week if we didn't really enjoy what we were doing -- but when we looked at Bonanzle's bank account at the beginning of October, it became clear it was going to take more than "enjoyment" to keep the site strong moving forward. Getting our server and bandwidth upgraded to keep up with the increasing traffic was going to take some dough. Enter our subscribers. These users are the engine that moves Bonanzle forward at full tilt even before our FVFs match our operating costs. Subscribers let us make feature dreams become feature realities, and they open doors for possible marketing avenues. If you have enjoyed the ride to 10,000 and you aren't yet a subscribing member, here's how to become one. Remember: with every new subscription, we become imperceptibly awesomer.
The Bonanzle Blogging Contingent. Many of our finest users might have never heard about Bonanzle if not for the efforts for those that have written about Bonanzle regularly. I'm not going to list names because there are too many of you, but it makes my day to see the Google Alerts for Bonanzle filled with exciting news day after day.
bonanzlemark. I'm not sure if this one qualifies as a "person" I'd like to thank, since technically I believe that Mark is at least 50% machine (working support email 7 days per week, week after week? Even the Terminator never tried that), but I'll let him onto the list anyway. He inspires me daily and I know he has inspired many of you with his patience and never-ceasing positive attitude. Nice going, cyborg!
The BAC. You know who you are. Those that complete their objectives and mark them as finished every week have driven thousands of new users to the site. Even though some of the objectives aren't fun, some are, and we are very grateful for the weekly efforts of our action-minded members for helping us carry out our carefully quasi-calculated plans.
The Positive Forum Attitudes. With more than 1000 posts per day, it has become totally beyond the abilities of Mark and I to keep an eye on all the forums at all the times. But when I do visit the forums, I am inspired by the efforts of those that have posted hundreds (some even more than a thousand -- hooray to attheboutique, jamiro, Paceset9999, and BargainBasement for earning that distinction!). We could hope for no better group of folks to welcome in the new users and inspire the old. Ready? Let's practice: "Yes, sellers are really selling things on Bonanzle. Have you uploaded your items to Google yet?" :)

Now Only 90k Away from 100k Users!

We're looking forward to sharing many more milestones with you guys. It has been a real pleasure to watch the community grow, browse the exceptional items, and see so many old and new faces on the site every day. 10,000 only begins to scratch the surface of what we can achieve with your help; yet it is a long way to have come, and we are deeply grateful to the efforts of so many of you to bring Bonanzle this far. I will leave you with some amusing memories of Bonanzle from its infancy many months ago. Ever wonder what the old Bonanzle home page looked like? How about the first item view page? The booth view page? Proof that even the biggest of ideas have to start at the humblest of beginnings. Enjoy!

Search and Category Overhaul

This evening we put a new search online along with about 26,700 more categories to sort your items into with the search.

Why the drastic changes?

When Bonanzle was first launched, we would usually have 100-300 items posted per day. All was so simple back then. You never needed to go more than two categories deep, because no second-level category had more than a couple hundred items. Times have changed. We now often get more than 10,000 items per day added to the site. Clearly, the 300-some categories that used to be sufficient were no longer going to cut it to help buyers browse and find the items they're looking for.

The Fix

In deciding how to fix the problem, we looked at pretty much all of the popular sites to see how they had fixed it. The conclusion was that there were a bunch of sites that make it hard to browse and filter items, and two sites that do a "good" job of it: eBay and Etsy. Ultimately, we decided to choose a search configuration similar to eBay's. Etsy's system is based on item "tags," which work reasonably well for handmade items, but have far less consistency than a category hierarchy does. Since Bonanzle allows items of all different sorts, using categories was really the only reasonable option, and we see no reason to reinvent the wheel in determining how to arrange our search such that it is as easy as possible to use. You'll also notice many other changes with the search, such as more items shown by default per page (48 instead of 20) and the default listing format has been changed from the ugly and small-pictured list to the item gallery that is used everywhere else on the site.

Got Items for Sale?

You should take advantage of the increased levels of categorization now available! The best way to do this is to use the batch editor, where you can put many of your items into a category in one fell swoop. You can also edit your items in your booth view the same as always, too. Note that there were a couple of categories that didn't map directly from our old category list to our new category list. These include the old categories 505, 14982, 16079, 20119, 20122, 20125, 26255, 28009, 28134, 29253, 31727, 39629, 71236, 79802, 82567, 88451, 102534, 137006, 137010, 151719. I don't have the names of those offhand, but if anyone is feeling ambitious and wants to post the category names to the comments section, you can use this category reference to figure out which categories these were.

Usual Cautions Apply

Adding the categories and updating the search were pretty huge changes, and I also managed to sneak in a couple other significant changes along with them (such as allowing you to scroll when using the new item form... no more despair for lower-resolution users!). I'd expect we'll still need to do some polishing on these over the next couple days, so please be patient with any irregularities you may find and report them to support or in the comments for this blog. (In particular, I haven't had a chance to test the changes on IE 6 yet, hoping to get to that tomorrow.. if you're having trouble with IE 6, you might need to wait an extra day (or upgrade :))) If you sense a trend with our most recent changes, it is intentional. The focus of November is on "features that increase sales." I've still got a couple more tricks up my sleeve to further our progress toward this goal. I reckon they'll probably be online within the next week or two. Stay tuned!

Fix Complete?

Update 4:13PM PST: It would appear that they did indeed find the culprit. I think we should be good to go now, save maybe one more few-second blip for a restart of this or that. More details to come about the root of the problem once we receive them. Update 3:57PM PST: They may have found the culprit. Update Later On: The cause was eventually tracked down to a Name Server that had gone haywire ("name servers" are the things that know where to send you when you type in "bonanzle.com"). The Name Server is not something that we directly manage -- it's managed by our Internet host, Planet Argon. They say they have never seen one of the name servers go kooky like that before, but will be keeping a close eye on them in the future, and will be able to fix the problem in a couple minutes if it happens again, rather than the two hours it took on Monday. Original post -- 3:00PM PST Our server experts have found a problem in some of the server hardware that they are currently working to fix. It appears as though we are going to need to swap out a network card, which will probably be done sometime between 4 and 5 PM PST today. In the meantime, there will be some slow load times. The server folks assure us that this is as peculiar a problem as they have seen, so we are hoping that after they get to the root of it, life will remain better. In the meantime, it's probably going to be a touch and go Monday afternoon/evening. Rest assured we're working to get it fixed as quickly as we can, though. Thanks for your patience.

Bonanzle November Newsletter

This morning we sent out the Bonanzle November newsletter to most members who were signed up to receive the newsletter who have logged in recently. If you didn't get the newsletter and would like to see it, you can take a look here. Deepest apologies if anybody got this newsletter more than once. Our emailer has been continuing to get a little zany at times, for reasons that still don't entirely make sense to me. We tell it to send each message once. It decides to sent each message between one and four times. I guess that Otto just thinks the newsletter is that good! Or maybe Otto has been haunted??? But seriously, we'll be doing more testing over the next couple days to try to get to the bottom of it before we set it free with a multi-person emailing again. Luckily, the problem doesn't affect single-person emails, which comprise 99% of the mail Otto sends. In the meantime, enjoy the newsletter and get started on some Christmas shopping while the shipping turnaround times are still in your favor! P.S. Anyone got any ideas as to how we should spruce up the site for the season? Any artists out there who could make us some reindeer or lights to string up on the grass and banner?

Intermittent Connection Problems

Update 10pm: Another 10 minutes of downtime from the ISP. Our hosting company is going to call the ISP tomorrow morning and get an explanation of what the flakiness is all about. We'll keep you updated if we hear anything interesting. Update 3pm: All is well again. There had been some attacks on the ISP originating from Asia, but they've isolated the attackers and blocked them. Our new ISP (Internet Service Provider) has been having some problems making connections to the Internet over the last hour. You can follow updates on the situation from here. They assure me that in the last year, this is the first time that anything of this sort has happened, so we're optimistic this is an unfortunately-timed rare incident. Sorry if you've had trouble connecting in the last hour! On the bright side, we are proud to finally be able to say "not our fault!" :)

New Server Bug #1: Spamming the Heck Out of You with Forum Response Emails (fixed)

Sorry to those of you who were inundated with 10s or 20s of forum update emails this evening. Please just delete them (don't mark them as spam or our email provider gets uptight). The forum email updater has been modified to be a bit less overzealous. It simply wants to please, you understand. But between you and me, sometimes I think the emailer just tries a little too hard. "Yes, forum email updater," we assure it, "that is a very impressive number of spurious emails you can send!" That seems to do the trick.

Hello Again!

Thanks to all for your patience over the last week as our uptime dropped from its usual 99.5% to a not-as-hot 98.2%. Even when the site was up, the ever-increasing traffic was leading to ever-increasing slowness that was making life a bit harder to enjoy for all. But those times look to be changing. You are reading this from one of the two brand new servers we recently leased thanks to our much appreciated subscribing members. Between the two servers, we now have an approximately 8x increase in capacity compared to our previous setup. Does that mean that pages will load 8x faster? Highly unlikely, especially at first (we've only setup about half of our capacity so far). As we continue to configure our new toys, there will be plenty more tricks for us to pull out of our hat in the weeks to come. But it's our hope that pages will load noticeably faster today, and that as we hone our configuration they'll stay fast as we grow into the tens of thousands of users and millions of items. For today (Tuesday) and maybe even the next couple days, there are probably going to be more peculiarities than usual as we get everything back into working order. Please email support if you find something you think is out of order, and we'll get to it as soon as we are able. Because of our expected higher-than-usual volume of support requests, the turnaround might be a bit slower than usual, but it doesn't mean we don't think you're totally swell. And away go the Tuesday Ticklers!

Psst!

Not to get ahead of ourselves, since Tuesday and probably Wednesday will require time spent putting the finishing touches on the server move, but we're really excited about the next item on our todo list: more detailed categorization for items. Sellers have been requesting deeper categorization since day one of Bonanzle -- and we've agreed with them -- but so far we've dilly dallied because it's hard to find an easy way to add more details about items without making the item posting process complicated. But after consulting with a crack team of scientists, excavators, and cartographers, we think we have a beat on how to make it happen. Better item details = a better browsing experience for buyers = more sales = glee. Barring complications with the new server, I think we'll have the increased item details online by early next week.

New Server -- Scheduled Downtime 10 PM Monday (UPDATED)

UPDATE 11/10: Testing for the new server is underway. Read about it here. Much progress has been made on getting the new server online over the last couple days. It is now preliminarily running at a secret location, and after we spend Monday putting it through some tests to ensure the smoothest transition possible, we plan to pack our bags and put it online for Tuesday morning. Doing the actual move will require the site to be down for some time while we copy the last of the files across and get everything up and running. I am planning to start the transition at 10 PM on Monday evening, and hope to have the site back online by Tuesday morning (ideally around 2 AM). Tuesday there may be a snag or two, since we have upgraded the software on many fronts as part of this move, but with any luck, we're hoping that with the new hardware plus the expertise of the folks helping us to manage this hardware (props to Planet Argon!), we won't have to talk about the "P" word (performance) for some time to come. Ah, to dream!

We're on TV! And all the other news that's fit to print (UPDATED 11/7)

Update 11/07 (Happy bday mom!) News link: Here is the link to the news clip we got featured in, all thanks to the BAC: http://www.king5.com/video/consumer-index.html?nvid=299504 New server status: My current "best guess" is that the new server will be online early next week (sometime between Monday and Wednesday). We have the computer hooked up, and will be moving all the goods to it over the next couple days. Of course, those goods include more than 3 million pictures uploaded... so it's hard to say exactly when that will be finished. But I think that early next week is a pretty good guess. Please bear with some slow page loads between now and then -- help is coming! Original post follows... It's been awhile since I've given an update on what's happening at Bonanzle, but much has been afoot, so let's talk about it!

Bonanzle on TV!

That's right, this morning Bonanzle was featured on local Seattle news station King 5 TV. This interview was a direct result of the efforts of the BAC from two weeks ago, proving that BACers are good... they're reeeall good. We'll see if they're good enough to get us on Oprah next! We are hoping to get a link to the interview in the next day or two. Once we get it, we'll be sure to post it here and elsewhere.

Help on the way: Bonanzle's new server should be online in a week or so

The first investment from our subscribing memberships was in that 8x faster fancy new server I had previously mentioned. The server arrived at its home last Thursday, and its configuration is ongoing. It's a big process. I'm guessing it will probably be about one more week until we finish it up and bring it online. But it be coming soon, soon, soon... and it should fix problems like the one's that many of you who try to login Monday will experience, where things bog down when several hundred people are online at once. We are well aware of the problem, and are confident that it will be resolved shortly. Thank you for your patience in the meantime.

More most-requested features now online

Two more items from your most-voted on list went online in the last week. The first was "completed item" searches. You probably already noticed it -- any time you do a search you can now mark the checkbox that indicates you want to search for items that have sold. Note that this search includes both items that sold through standard offers, and items that were manually marked as sold by sellers. In the case of the latter, the item won't have detailed information about when it sold or what the terms of the sale were, but it should still give you a sense of what is selling and what isn't. The other new feature, hot off the press from last night, is international shipping. Did you know that 52% of Bonanzle's new visitors aren't from the U.S.? It's true! Which is why we are now letting you setup flat-rate shipping policies for any country you care to ship to. To setup international shipping for your items, go to the "batch editor" for your booth, and click on the link (to the left of the "Submit" button) for "Shipping options." From there, you can specify a flat rate for whatever regions of the world you're willing to ship to, and apply it to however many items you please. When a buyer from one of these regions views your items, they will then be able to buy your items immediately, without having to wait for you to approve an offer at a specific price. Take advantage of it today and double the number of possible buyers for your items, whydontchya?

New Contest

The Grass is Greener contest is now over, but we've decided to take the "Referred Users" component of the contest and extend it through at least November. If you look at the invited users leaderboard it now shows who has invited the most users for November, along with the Bonanzle gift certificates that will be won by the top SIX best referrers. This is an easy way for easy money, doing what you would do anyway: telling your friends and customers that you've moved to Bonanzle. Invite a friend today and get yourself some Bonanzlecash for your Christmas shopping.

Final Raffle Results, and a New Contest

The "Grass is Greener at Bonanzle" promotion is complete! This round accumulated results from midnight October 26th through midnight October 31st. In all, there were 1300-some entries for the week (where each buyer got an entry per item they bought, each user got five entries per user referred, and anyone that signed up and subscribed to the newsletter got one entry). The top three entry-getters this week were Cindy'sCloset with a gaudy 170 entries; ASqueakyFoot followed with a rollicking 135 entries this week to take second; and thetlcshoppe came in third with 25 entries, lots of familiar faces at the top here. Now, to pick a winner! So without further ado, by random drawing, the winner of this week's drawing for $200 in Bonanzle goodies is raffle ticket #1006013805 AKA user #12498 AKA.........

asyourbabygrows!

Congratulations to you!

Popularity Contest Results

The end of the contest also signifies that it's time to hand out the gold, silver and bronze medals for most users invited to the site during September and October. Here are your medal winners:

Gold medal, 87 users referred: ASqueakyFoot!

Silver medal, 69 users referred: Cindy'sCloset!

Bronze medal, 50 users referred: thetlcshoppe!

Congrats to all three of you, for $300, $200 and $100 worth of Bonanzle merchandise earned, respectively! For all of the winners above, to get your merchandise, please fill your carts with the stuff you want, enter your shipping information, and leave the cart at payment, then email support@bonanzle.com and let us know you're ready to have us pay. Paypal or Google Checkout are both fine for this. Thank you everybody for playing! We've decided to make the referral contest an ongoing monthly one, since it was such a success. I'll talk about that in a future blog, though.

Mystery Gift Revealed!

Week six of our "Grass is Greener at Bonanzle" promotion is complete! This round accumulated results from midnight October 19th through midnight October 26th. In all, there were 1300-some entries for the week (where each buyer got an entry per item they bought, each user got five entries per user referred, and anyone that signed up and subscribed to the newsletter got one entry). This week was a double mystery week! Not only do we not know the seller, but we also don't know what the prize is. That's a lot of work to get done. Let's start with the frontrunners and the winner. The top three entry-getters this week were Cindy'sCloset with a gaudy 112 entries; thetlcshoppe (the juggernaut who accumulated 140 entries last week) followed with a strong 95 entries this week to take second; and -- who else -- ASqueakyFoot came in third with 50 entries, her umpteenth week placing in the top three. Now, to pick a winner! So without further ado, by random drawing, the winner of this week's drawing for a mystery prize is raffle ticket #1006011318 AKA user #1516 AKA.........

Cindy'sCloset!

I guess that having the most raffle tickets does count for something, eh? The winning ticket was one for referring cyndi18 to the site. Welcome aboard, cyndi18! So now it's time to unveil this week's mystery prize. We'll give you a hint: it's Oprah's favorite new toy... did you guess? Probably not, cuz you saw a huge picture of it right here:

This is the final week of the Grass is Greener giveaway! This week is abbreviated, it ends on Halloween when the ghost will announce the final winner of the contest -- buyer's choice of any item on Bonanzle priced $200 or less! Don't miss out!

Google Base and Bonanzle: A Story of Star-Crossed Lovers with a Happy Ending

Background

Once upon a time there was a small, upstart site called "Bonanzle" that was smitten with a service called "Google Base." Google Base is a special part of Google that allows anybody to send their items to Google in a special format that Google understands. Once Google has those items in the format it likes, it puts them online for buyers to find. All the items can be searched for on the Google Base web site, but more usefully, any items submitted to Google Base also have the potential to show up in the "Google Products" search. Google Products is what you see as the three listings at the top of the page when you do a search like this. Many millions of sellers use Google Product searches every day, and the key to unlock Google Products is Google Base. So, back to that story: all was proceeding quite swimmingly between Bonanzle and Google Base until one day in late August, when the founder noticed that Bonanzle's traffic had dropped for the first time ever. Worried, he looked through the traffic sources for the site, and noticed that traffic to Bonanzle from Google had dropped precipitously, by more than half of its usual volume. After a little more digging around, the founder discovered that Google Base had taken all of the tens of thousands of Bonanzle items out of the product search. The concerned founder sent a letter to Google Base, and eventually he learned that a handful of the 100,000 items online at Bonanzle were video game "mod chip" devices, which go against the Google Base terms of service. The founder quickly fixed the problem, and about a week later, Bonanzle's feed was back online and the situation was forgotten about. Until a few weeks later, when it happened again: this time because certain items submitted to Google Base were no longer on the site (presumably because they had sold during the day). Then, last week, it happened a third time: this time for reasons that have yet to be revealed to the Bonanzle team. But even without hearing the specific reasons, what had become clear was two things: 1) Google Base is an incredibly great service that can provide huge amounts of traffic, free of charge, because Google is run by a bunch of sweethearts and 2) That this fantastic service was not going to do our sellers a whole lot of good if Bonanzle could not police each of its hundreds of thousands of items well enough to keep the feed online. A solution to reliably keep Bonanzle items online with Google Base/Products was needed, and I'm happy to report that we now have it (er, at least the preliminary version of it :))!

The Solution? Empower You!

Bonanzle is now equipped to be your partner in creating your own Google Base account. We have created two easy ways (one takes about two minutes, the other takes about 10) to get your Bonanzle items up on your own Google Base account. There are numerous advantages to publishing your items on your own account:

It won't get taken down repeatedly, unless you're putting bad items in it.
You will have access to all the stats on how many people saw your items, and how many clicked through to them.
You can edit the items by hand in Google Base, to include extra attributes that Bonanzle doesn't allow you to specify (ISBN, UPC, etc.). This extra detail will help your items get shown higher in the Google Products search.

Of course, there is one disadvantage, which is that you have to setup your Google Base account, but it's really not as hard as you think. And even if it were hard, it is probably the difference of 50% more traffic to your items by setting it up, at no cost to you. Well worth doing! I've added some detailed help instructions on how to get rolling with your own Google Base account. If you have a booth setup, visit "My Bonanzle" and (duh) "Add your booth to Google Products search." I can not overstate how important I think it is for every seller to take advantage of the free traffic that Google will give to your booth if you setup a Google Base account with them. When Bonanzle submitted its feed to Google automatically, there were an average of 3-10 potential buyers per day for each booth through Google Products traffic! When you set up your own Google Base account with your Bonanzle items, you'll probably get at least as much. So go git em, tigers!

And the iPod Raffle Winner Is...

Week five of our "Grass is Greener at Bonanzle" promotion is complete! This round accumulated results from midnight October 12th through midnight October 19th. In all, there were 1623 entries for the week (where each buyer got an entry per item they bought, each user got five entries per user referred, and anyone that signed up and subscribed to the newsletter got one entry). Lots of those tickets generated through sales happening in the last week, congrats to our many sellers! The top three entry-getters this week were thetlcshoppe with an astounding 140 entries (!); one of our old favorites morejunk4u was in second with a strong 59 entries; and in third was Guilty*pleasure, accumulating 45 entries and sporting an adorable profile picture. Honorable mentions for more than 20 entries go to to ASqueakyFoot (indefatigable!) with 35 entries, patsyshort with 35 entries, and ScarletsLounge with 20 entries (not content with just her chicken suit, apparently!). Now, there's just one more thing... picking a winner! So without further ado, by random drawing, the winner of week two's drawing for their very own iPod Touch 8GB is raffle ticket #1006008138 AKA user #9007 AKA.........

BestSeller!

With a mere one raffle ticket, BestSeller has defied some stunning odds to come away with one of the raffle's most expensive prizes. WTG BestSeller! But don't despair, thetlcshoppe and morejunk4u, you guys are in second and third place for overall most users invited, putting you in prime position for some fat gift cards as we start to come down the home stretch of this contest! It's still anybody's game for spots 2 and 3 in the user inviting. Last week, I don't think thetlcshoppe was even on the list, and now they're in second place! Go get 'em, tigers! Next up is the Mystery Gift Week! What will it be? The most intriguing prize of the contest, that's what!

Membership Concerns - A Word from the Founder

Lately there have been concerns from a vocal minority of Bonanzlers about the effects of our new voluntary membership program. Below I'll summarize the origin of these concerns, as well as our reaction to them.

What's the Fuss About?

Moderator kitten would have never let these people say that subscriptions affect search results!

Misinformation. The first post in the Bonanzle forum thread about memberships begins with some confusion about whether memberships will allow certain users to gain an unfair advantage in the search results. The answer is no, and the membership documentation is pretty clear on that point. If someone is looking for the items you have for sale, they will be able to find them equally well whether you're a member or not.
"I've Seen this Before." Some users have drawn broad analogies between our memberships and the memberships that have led to sellers being on unequal ground on other sites. What these analogies fail to note is the numerous successful sites (Amazon with Web Stores, Google with AdWords) that allow sellers to get extra exposure for a voluntary fee. Like Google and Amazon, non-paying Bonanzle sellers are on equal ground with paying Bonanzle when a buyer is searching for a specific item, or browsing through items.
"Profile Stars Create a Caste System." Does the Bonanzle Action Club icon create a caste system? Do Biznik's membership stars create a caste system? The profile stars acknowledge our appreciation for those who have the means to help provide a revenue source we can use to continue to grow Bonanzle. The negative connotation of a "caste system" is that the lower rungs of the caste bear undue suffering as a result of their unchangeable position. I do not believe that basic (non-paying) members are enduring undue suffering as the result of not having a star icon in their profile.
"But I've Been Promoting Bonanzle Tirelessly, Don't I Deserve Perks?" Of course you do! And we're working almost every hour of every day to add the perks you request to the site. Though our original intention had been to make the features currently listed under "Pro Booths" into features you had to pay to use, we instead opted to continue to keep everything free that had been free before. The perks of being a basic Bonanzle member will continue to grow with each day, as we work through your top requests on the Next Up Improvement list. Furthermore, we hope that when you're promoting Bonanzle, you are promoting your booth. The reward in promoting your Bonanzle booth is the increased sales you'll reap when you do so.
"It's Too Expensive!" So is a new Winnebago, but you don't have to buy one.

So, What's Next?

What's next is that people will make their own decision about whether they think that by offering the (completely voluntary) option of becoming a Bonanzle member, that we have ruined their day. Those that think we have will continue to say so, while the majority of people will continue to either not care or think it's a great way to support Bonanzle. I think Kathy Sierra puts it best when explaining why a minority of people would become so upset at the prospect of Bonanzle offering memberships: If some people don't HATE your product, it's mediocre. Give the article a read and you'll understand that this won't be the last time that there will be people who are upset with Bonanzle's direction. That said, we are quite confident that offering the benefits of exposure, Google Analytics, and an icon do nothing to affect the fairness of the marketplace as a whole. If you feel the same way, your best bet is to speak your peace in the forums once or twice, then just agree to disagree with those that feel otherwise. Most people who have made up their minds don't change them, and most people have made up their minds by the time they post their opinion.

And One More Thing!

There is no question that, with the support of both our paying and non-paying members, Bonanzle is going to continue to move forward as the best marketplace to find friendly people and enjoy each other's company as you buy and sell everything but the ordinary. Our growth has continued to increase exponentially every month, regardless of occasional differences of opinion between users like this one (September "Fees" thread, anyone?). We're now growing by more than 100 users per day, sometimes by as many as 300! There are plenty of exciting times ahead, so take a breath and savor the community you all have built on Bonanzle. The fun we can have buying and selling extraordinary items together will undoubtedly grow with every new day and new user.

Be a Member (Re-Updated)

Update 10:30AM: Memberships should now work in Internet Explorer! Update 8 PM: Yes, we will accept money order for memberships as well. If you'd like to sign up that way, email support@bonanzle.com for an address. I had hoped to get Amazon payments setup to accept subscriptions through, but after further research tonight, it is clear that that would be at least a day-long project, and we don't have a day to spend on it right now. So for the time being, Paypal or Money Order will be the two options for subscriptions. Thanks to those that have signed up already! It's been an overwhelming response, and we are thrilled about the technology upgrades it will allow us to make. Original Post: Today was a very busy day in Bonanzleland, but as I get ready to go to retreat to my peaceful slumber before the sun rises, I wanted to briefly mention the new link you might notice in the "My Bonanzle" section labeled Member. This story begins, long, long ago (last week), in a place not too far away (here). We tried to setup donations to the site, but within 15 minutes of donations going online, Google had suspended our Google Checkout merchant account and told us that it would be patently illegal for a company not registered as a "non-profit" to accept donations of any sort. "But," we argued, "it will help us pay for better servers and more things that we want to have!" Still, Google held firm to their rules (which are actually the government's rules, if you want to get technical), so donations were officially out. But we have heard from many of you that are grandfathered in without FVFs, and from various others, who want to help Bonanzle stay financially solvent so that we can continue to add server power and keep this train headed forward at full tilt. And that brings us to memberships. There are two types you can choose from: Plus Membership or Premier Membership. Both offer advantages to sellers beyond helping Bonanzle prosper. I'm not going to go over the specifics of those advantages here, because they're already spelled out on the membership page. Suffice to say, if you are interested in helping Bonanzle to continue to grow and provide a place where it's fun to transact, take a look at our membership packages and consider joining. We have a long list of features we plan to continue to add to both the Plus and Premier membership packages over the coming weeks, so sign up today. The deal is good and getting better. And remember -- if you don't got the cash to become a member now, don't sweat it. We are purposely setting up our membership benefits so that you can still continue to use Bonanzle and prosper even with just a basic (free) membership. P.S. More payment options for membership coming soon. Google doesn't allow recurring payments, but we have our eye on a certain other payment gateway that I know Bobbi is going to be pleased to see up on the site.

On Our Radar

Just to keep you guys in the loop who have voted on "Next Up Features" that haven't gotten done lately, wanted to provide an idea about what we're up to and what our next priorities are:

(Obvious) Continue to iron out bottlenecks to maintain speed during peak hours. Many improvements were made on that front today, but with our current growth, it's only a matter of time until more improvements are necessary. We are currently in the process of planning a move to another new server, this one with approximately 8x the computing power of our current one. But that requires some cashola, which explains objective #2:
Implement site memberships. As soon as the site stops being slow, we plan to add the option of subscribing as a member of the site. This will have many perks, chief among them from our perspective, that you will help us afford an 8x faster server. :-)
More measures to reduce spammers/frauds. Previously an undiscovered part of the community, with traffic comes spammers, so we plan to spend some cycles making it harder for them to get access to and do business on Bonanzle. In the meantime, PLEASE REPORT ANYONE INTERESTED IN RECEIVING PAYMENT VIA WESTERN UNION, and please be very wary of sellers with no feedback selling expensive items (doubly if they aren't active in the community). It isn't that these sellers are necessarily frauds, but, well, it can be hard to tell if they are. Your best bet to protect yourself from fraud is to use Google Checkout or Paypal, so you can work with them and your credit card company if you do happen to get unlucky and find an unscrupulous users.

As you can see, this list doesn't include exciting new features, because to be honest, right now, I think it's most important that the site performs smoothly and makes it as difficult as possible for the spammers and frauds. But hopefully the days of new features will return soon. We're sure to sneak some in here and there anyway. When we do get back to features, I have a number of ideas I'm excited to go forth with to help sellers make more sales and buyers find more cool stuff to buy.

Slow? Oh no! Say it ain't so, Joe!

Update Oct 14th @ 2 PM: We contracted some server professionals this morning who have swapped out half the software used to run Bonanzle to a different platform better built for sites with lots of traffic. In all tests since, I've gotten login page to load in usually 3-5 seconds, 10 tops. This is a good sign. Just wanted to drop the briefest of lines here to say that yes we have noticed that the site (in particular, the secure pages, like the login, new user form, and eBay importer) has been lagging a bit during peak hours the last couple days (in particular, today). It is my sole focus currently to stamp out whatever is making the login page lag, and I'm sure it will be ironed out by mid-week. Which means you Tuesday Ticklers may have to deal with a bit of lag... we shall see. In the meantime, you can make your life slightly easier if you click the "Stay logged in" checkbox when you login, that way you don't have to visit the page in the first place. If you do have to visit the page, rest assured it will always load eventually, but sometimes it is taking 1-2 minutes during our peak traffic times. This should help to explain some of what is making it difficult for the site to keep up: Thanks a lot for the traffic, you jerks. :-)

Who Gets the Chicken Suit?

Week four of our "Grass is Greener at Bonanzle" promotion is complete! This round accumulated results from midnight October 5th through midnight October 12th. In all, there were 1057 entries for the week (where each buyer got an entry per item they bought, each user got five entries per user referred, and anyone that signed up and subscribed to the newsletter got one entry). Lots of those tickets generated through sales happening in the last week, congrats to our many sellers! The top three entry-getters this week were ScarletsLounge with (what I think break a record for single-week entries?) 95 entries; a very familiar face ASqueakyFoot was in second with 30 entries (that's three consecutive weeks the top three! ASqueakyFoot esta en fuego!); and in third was debsvintageplace, accumulating 27 entries. Honorable mention to Cindy'sCloset for 20 entries. Now, there's just one more thing... picking a winner! So without further ado, by random drawing, the winner of week two's drawing for their very own chicken suit is raffle ticket #1006006611 AKA user #6210 AKA.........

ScarletsLounge!

Whaddya know, a Bonanzle first... the entrant with the most tickets wins! Next week's prize is one of the raffle's most expensive: the Apple iPod Touch 8GB. There could be some fierce competition for this one! Keep up the good work, all!

Big Changes Aplenty

A number of pretty big changes were made to the site tonight, and I wanted to specifically call a couple of them out in case they may affect you.

Extensive Javascript Updates

We've finally had the chance to update our main Javascript library and combine what had been numerous big Javascript files into fewer small ones. The benefits of this are that 1) the site will download faster when you first browse to it (if you use the site from a modem, this should be a pretty significant difference) 2) some slower javascripts (like the ones that run the booth chat) may now run faster and 3) we have a bunch of new Javascript effects and such opened up to us. The bad news is that Javascript changes are some of the riskiest and most difficult-to-test changes that we make, because they can affect every browser differently. If you find yourself getting Javascript errors or otherwise having problems where you previously had not, please clear your browser's cache before you report it as a bug; if your browser has the old Javascript files in memory, then you're likely to experience weirdnesses.

More Cart Updates

Many users have mentioned that 1) it's easy to miss the "Edit" link next to the "payment type" in the cart and 2) it's annoying to not be able to change your offer if you clicked "Buy now" but then realize you want to change your payment type. Both are now fixed. You can now change details about your offer any time until it's accepted or purchased (whichever comes first), and the edit link has been made far more prominent. Also, if a buyer clicks "Buy now" but chooses not to pay for the item, it no longer clutters up the seller's list of offers

Bonanzas Once Monthly

With more and more sellers having more and more Bonanzas, a suggestion we've often heard is that we should make Bonanzas more unique (e.g., bigger discounts, cooler items). Knowing that this would eventually be an issue, we've long intended to move to once/monthly Bonanzas as a means to combat Bonanza boredom, but the question was "when?" The answer is now. In the next week or two, we will allow you to have up to two or three Bonanzas per month, by allowing you to purchase extra Bonanzas if your heart is truly set on the getting the extra exposure and fun of more Bonanzas. For now, though, Bonanzas will be capped at one every four weeks. This doesn't affect already-scheduled Bonanzas.

eBay Importer Updates

We now import eBay Motors listings, and our HTML importer has gotten a lot smarter about importing HTML attributes with UPPER-CASED NAMES (e.g., <SPAN style="font-weight:bold">my bold element</SPAN>). We also now strip out style, script, and object tags, rather than leaving them in to ugly-up your imported items.

Extra Web Servers Re-added

We originally tried this last Thursday and ended up crashing the site for a few hours. Whoops! The good news from the episode was that 1) it convinced the founder to set up automated updates to have his phone call him if the site was down and 2) it was only a matter of time until we worked out the issues and gave it another shot. That time has now come. Having extra web servers means that you should have less drag waiting for pages to load during peak times of the day, when our existing web servers have become pretty flooded with all the traffic.

And That's Not All

There's a slew of other medium and minor improvements that you can see from the "What's New" list. Usually, we much prefer to update things one-at-a-time so there are less things to go wrong; but sometimes having a big group of updates like this are inevitable. Our apologies for a higher-than-usual liklihood that you might find a bug or two on Wednesday. We'll clean their clocks as soon as we find them and I'd expect any temporary weirdnesses to be wiped out by Thursday.

Week Three Raffle Results

Week three of our "Grass is Greener at Bonanzle" promotion is complete! This round accumulated results from midnight September 28th through midnight October 5th. In all, there were 1069 entries for the week (where each buyer got an entry per item they bought, each user got five entries per user referred, and anyone that signed up and subscribed to the newsletter got one entry). The top three entry-getters this week were morejunk4u (sporting a smashing 17 referred users thus far... shizam!) with 80 entries; ASqueakyFoot was in second with 62 entries (a second week in a row in the top three!); and in third was funkygarb, accumulating 60 entries. Another week of impressive numbers. Now, there's just one more thing... picking a winner! So without further ado, by random drawing, the winner of week two's drawing for a copy of Wii Fit is raffle ticket #1006004616 AKA user #5083 AKA.........

Libbykins!

We can only hope that the win will inspire Libbykins to update that boring profile picture, eh? :) Way to sort of (Libbykins had 11 tickets) beat the odds, Libbykins! In other news, it looks like ASqueakyFoot is running away on the leaderboard, let's give a hand to Ms. Popularity! But there's still a tight race going on for second and third place on the board, with morejunk, AuroraGG, Forestmaker, funkygarb, and many others all in the running. Who wants hundreds of dollars in Bonanzle merch? Who wants it bad? ;) Next week's prize is the most talked about item of the raffle -- the beloved and defeathered... adult chicken suit! This is gonna be a hot week, you'll only have so many opportunities in your life to get your mitts on a suit so fine, folks!

Booth Custom Categories: Redux

The most requested non-complete feature you've voted for, revised custom categories, is now online for your testing pleasure! To use it, go to Sell -> Advanced Options and at the bottom of the page, you're given the option to have booth custom categories work "Automatically" or "Manually." If you choose "Automatically," they'll work the way they've always worked, that is, you create a custom category called "Ninjas", and when a buyer clicks on your booth's "Ninjas" category, all items that have the word "Ninjas" in the title or description will appear. The new type of booth custom category is "Manual." For manual custom categories, you create your categories the same way as always -- by entering in a list of them, one category per line, on the Advanced Booth Options page (don't forget to click "Save All Options" when you're done adding your categories). Now here's the rub: to map your items into a custom booth category, you go to the batch editor, then specifically select items that you want to be put into your booth categories. If you click the "See all options" link in the batch editor (and you've setup manual booth categories), you'll see a new option to set the booth custom category of the selected items. Choose your custom booth category from the drop down list, choose the items you want to categorize, hit submit, and voila! If this all sounds a bit complicated, don't worry: 1) Booth custom categories are only necessary for advanced sellers, they are by no means necessary for your average booth and 2) There is a help document with examples of how to use custom categories which you can read here. I've only had the chance to do limited testing on these new custom categories so far, but they seem to work from what I can tell. Give them a shot, you 30-ish people who voted for them, and let me know how they work for you!

Bonanzle Mentioned at KillerStartups.com

Bonanzle got mentioned today at killerstartups.com! This website is visited by more than 500,000 unique visitors per month, and is a great opportunity for traffic if you cast your vote for Bonanzle! http://www.killerstartups.com/Site-Reviews/bonanzle-com-buy-and-sell-unique-items Action Club members and everyone else can get in on this action. It'll take mere seconds of your time, and could have big rewards. Many thanks!

Join the Bonanzle Action Club

Our community has proven time and time again that if we set our mind to a goal we can achieve anything. So when Mark and I sat down a few days ago to ask ourselves how we can keep up Bonanzle's momentum and continue to increase our buyer traffic, our first thought was the obvious one: get the community involved! Thus, the Bonanzle Action Club (BAC) was born! The BAC will consist of up to 50 of our most highly motivated, action-minded Bonanzlers who will work together with us toward weekly goals that will help Bonanzle burst through the atmosphere and into orbit (that's a good thing, trust me).

What Does It Take to Join?

Each week, every BAC member will be given one actionable objective to help Bonanzle grow. The task will never take more than 20 minutes of your time. Some examples of a BAC objective might include: post a comment about Bonanzle on a specific forum or blog; email a specific media person to tell them to feature the site; or Digg some article about the site. We will email you at the beginning of each week to let you know what the week's action objective is. The objective will also show up in the list of BAC objectives (accessible via "My Bonanzle"). When you complete the objective, you check it off your list, and your karma + Bonanzle cred increase a notch. We should be clear that joining the BAC is an important commitment. If you are considering signing up, you should be willing and ready to follow through on the objectives. We are limiting enrollment to 50 people, so that we only keep people on board who feel that Bonanzle is worth 15-20 minutes of their time per week.

What's In It for YOU?

Plenty! First of all, the more traffic that Bonanzle gets, the more traffic your booth gets and the better the chances that you can make Bonanzle your permanent residence for buying and selling items. Secondly, members of the BAC will be given priority status for support requests and will have a higher say in prioritizing our objectives for Bonanzle. BAC members will also have a pretty slick avatar added to their profile to identify them as a BAC member (starting Friday). You can wear your BAC badge with honor, knowing that you have played a vital part in Bonanzle's growth. Buyers who see this badge will know that you are an integral (and probably trustable!) part of the Bonanzle community. Trust = Sales. Sales = Good.

What Are You Waiting for?

You have already witnessed firsthand what we can accomplish in our community. Now imagine what happens when we channel that energy towards one goal each week to help drive traffic to the site. Operators are standing by! Go to "My Bonanzle" and click the new link near the bottom of the page that mentions the Bonanzle Action Club.

Site-wide upgrade: take two!

This evening we’re trying again to double the server’s capacity (last night it took too long when we started at midnight, so we canceled it). STarting at seven, the site will begin backing itself up. YOu may notice increased slowness or bugs that aren’t usually there. A few hours later (our best guess is around midnight) the site will go down altogether while the copied files are moved to the new server. Thanks for your patience as we get ready to get big! Update 3:05 AM PST: The upgrade is now complete and the daily site update is compete as well. The site will probably feel somewhat faster Thursday, and more faster still on Friday when I use our server's oodles of memory to add 50% more web servers to our cluster of them (translation from tech speak: it's going to keep getting faster)

Week Two Raffle Results

Week two of our contest is complete. This round accumulated results from midnight September 21st through midnight September 28th. In all, there were 848 entries (where each buyer got an entry per item they bought, each user got five entries per user referred, and anyone that signed up and subscribed to the newsletter got one entry). The top three entry-getters this week were ASqueakyFoot (who has referred 33 users thus far... shizam!) with 128 entries; clearanceclarence was in second with 30 entries; and in third was MissMary, accumulating 20 entries. Now, there's just one more thing... picking a winner! So without further ado, by random drawing, the winner of week two's drawing for a YEAR LONG, TWO AT A TIME NETFLIX MEMBERSHIP is raffle ticket #1006001724 AKA user #2815 AKA.........

MissMary!

Way to go MissMary! Don't get too down, ASqueakyFoot, looks like you're still in a solid first place to win the $300 Bonanzle item of your choice for most users referred: leaderboard. Next week's prize is the enormously popular Wii Fit! So tell your pals about bonanzle and git your fit!

By Request - Your Top Two Voted on Features

While dour economists predict that recession is near, we predict more good times ahead in the future, starting with the announcement that your top two most requested features are now ONLINE! "Woo hoo!" (<-- reclaimed on behalf of the noncommercial sector after the WaMu buyout) What am I talking about?

Combined Shipping Discounts (CSD) Now Online

Go to Sell -> Advanced Options and take a looksie where the dumb CSD used to be. You will find a new and improved setup of CSD that mirrors what (ahem) "other" popular marketplace sites have successfully used with their sellers. You can now setup a variety of CSD types per your taste. These discounts will be applied automatically when a buyer visits their cart, so "Buy Now" suddenly becomes a more viable option for sellers that were previously using counteroffers to get buyers a reasonable rate on combined item shipping. We still don't have customized "Shipping Profiles," but you can always setup additional booths in the meantime if you have a large volume of inventory where some items should use one CSD policy and other items should use a different policy.

WYSIWYG Editor Now Online

Many sellers had lamented the size and difficulty of editing HTML for the text box on the new item form. But lament no more, perfectionistic seller, for Bonanzle now offers the option to switch to a bigger WYSIWYG editor for creating your item description. After there are a few lines (or a few hundred characters) into your item description, a box will pop up on the new item form that gives you the option to switch to "full screen edit" mode. (Actually, I don't remember if that's exactly what the box says... it's something like that.) Personally, I'm just as happy not using HTML in my items, so I hope that the simple-loving sellers amongst you don't feel guilty not using HTML in your item descriptions. But I know there are many who feel HTML helps showcase their item in important ways (as evidenced by the numerous votes for this feature), so this feature should give them a nice, built-in way to get that showcased look and feel. Let us know if you experience any anomalous behavior with these new features. We also made a bunch of improvements to the UI of the cart, based on the questions and feedback we received from buyers. It's a boom week at Bonanzle!

What Happened to New Features?

If you are a follower of the "What's New?" list, you might these days be wondering to yourself, "What happened to the fantastic new features lately? I remember a day when new features flowed into Bonanzle like water down the Mississippi. Gimme more of that!" What happened is growth, lots of it! There are a list of numerous features that we have been hoping to add to the site for the last couple weeks, but our foremost priority is always to ensure that Bonanzle is fast and bug free, and keeping those two requirements satisfied in the face of our incredible growth has been a very difficult, resource-intensive proposition lately. But never fear. While I suspect that the rest of this week will probably be filled with more stability/performance improving measures (goal of Wednesday is to eliminate the lags that tend to happen on the hour each hour when we're doing fancy server stuff in the background), my hope is that next week we will have a reprieve from focusing on stability/performance, and can go back to more fun tasks, like combined shipping discounts, custom booth categories, and a WYSIWYG description editor. Stay tuned!

Find Everything but the Ordinary

Greetings Bonanzlers! Most of you will probably notice a few changes on the home page and in the logo today. I wanted to take a minute to explain what the changes mean and why we made them.

What the Changes Are - At a Glance

We changed the text of the title bar, the founder's quote, and the tagline (in the logo, under the word "Bonanzle"). Previously, the title and founder's quote mentioned that we were the best alternative amongst lookalike eBay alternatives. The tagline said "Real people. Real Deals. Real Time." Real catchy stuff, you betchya. The gist of the new messaging is that Bonanzle is the best place to buy and sell unique items with friendly people.

You know, we've always had a soft spot for the extraordinary...

Why the Change?

With more than 100k items (where's the blog about that, anyway? Slackers!) posted, the continuation of monthly traffic tripling, and more positive press streaming in, it's high time that Bonanzle makes some important decisions about its future. Our most important business goal is to create an environment where sellers sell their items. It's one thing to build a great inventory of items and sellers, and we've succeeded at that beyond, I think, most anybody's expectations. But with that inventory comes a responsibility on our behalf to do everything within our power to help those items sell so that our sellers not only enjoy themselves but make sales and become filthy stinking rich, in a small time seller kind of way. So what we needed was a reason -- preferably a damn good reason -- that buyers would visit Bonanzle. And I think we've found it in branding Bonanzle as a place to "find everything but the ordinary." We've written up what it means "to find everything but the ordinary" here. The gist is that we're going to focus specifically on making Bonanzle a great place to sell items that aren't new, shiny, and mass-produced, because we think Amazon does a great job at selling those items already. Our goal is to continue to emphasize the categories that sellers have already come to associate as Bonanzle's strengths: collectibles; clothing, shoes, and accessories; rare/old books and magazines; jewelry; toys; crafts; and antiques. (No, that's not an absolute list of categories we'll allow -- just a list of the categories we have the most items in right now) What's the benefit of this emphasis to buyers? Simple: when a buyer thinks to themselves, "Where do I go to find cool, unique items," the answer is now "Bonanzle." Period. Because that's what we're going to focus on providing moreso than any other marketplace will. It's no coincidence that we're declaring this as our emphasis at the same time that eBay continues set its sights on competing with Amazon via its Buy.com listings and policy changes. eBay was originally founded upon being the best place to find the unique items that Bonanzle sellers have brought with them. As eBay continues to move away from these supporting these sellers, we're going to move toward supporting them.

Why Else the Change?

We now avoid what I'll deem "the iOffer syndrome," that is, the condition that befalls a site where the only distinction in a busy buyer's mind is that the site has less items than eBay. You could try to argue that iOffer has worked in spite of the iOffer syndrome, seeing as how iOffer now has 1 million items and a decent base of users. But I would argue that iOffer has had to spend many, many years, and many, many millions of dollars to arrive at the point of being a so-so alternative to prospective buyers. Compare this to Etsy, which, by differentiating the type of items it specializes in, has taken off like a rocket with far fewer resources than iOffer.

I Have Shiny, New, Mass-Produced Items for Sale on Bonanzle. What Does This Change Mean to Me?

It means that selling your items won't be the emphasis of our marketing efforts, but you're welcome to stick around if you're enjoying yourself. Chances are that you were going to have a tough road to hoe anyway, given that when buyers want your items their first thought will be "Amazon sells those!" You should probably be thinking the same.

What Ever Happened to that Talk that Bonanzle Didn't Need a Category Niche?

Oh, you mean the blog from a few weeks ago that too many business people assume that every marketplace needs an Etsy-like niche? I argued at the time that we didn't need such a niche, because we already had a niche: a friendly community. There's no question that our community sets us apart from other marketplaces, and is itself a niche. But that is a niche that appeals 80% to sellers. Often times, buyers will be far less involved in the community of a site -- they just want to buy an item and move on with their life. That's fine by us. But it does mean that we need a niche that makes buyers crave Bonanzle the same way that simplicity+friendly community have made sellers enjoy Bonanzle to this point. Let us know what you think of the changes in the comments section below! We know that not everybody will be crazy about this move. But ultimately we know that focusing on the non-generic will drive increasing sales for all in the months to come.

Listen Up If You Want Your Precious Features...!

Yesterday a new feature was added to the "Next Up Improvements" list wherein if you have voted for a feature, you can leave a comment on what your specific vision for the feature is. For the top two user selected choices ("More combined shipping options" and "better booth custom categories"), the programmer would love to hear some specific opinions from you voters about how specifically you see these features working, and what sites the programmer might want to look to as reference for how they ought to work. Failure to opine may result in delay of feature implementation. Yikes!

Week One Raffle Results

That's right, our "Grass is Greener" has completed its first week-and-a-half of results. This first round accumulated results from the beginning of September through this past Saturday, the 20th. In all, there were 1399 entries (where each buyer got an entry per item they bought, each user got five entries per user referred, and anyone that signed up and subscribed to the newsletter got one entry). The top three entry-getters were Forestmaker (who has referred an astounding 49 users since joining in August.. yowza!) with 75 entries; our bestest blogging buddy Felicitations was in second with 43 entries; and in third was ashwin8186, accumulating 35 entries. Other users getting 20 or more entries were Paceset9999 (24 entries), AuroraGG (23 entries), AngelaDeleon (22 entries), and ZiggyZool (20 entries). Way to go all! Mighty impressive numbers! Now, there's just one more thing... picking a winner! So without further ado, by random drawing, the winner of week one's drawing for a Canon 7.1 MP Digital Camera is raffle ticket #991 AKA user #2004 AKA.........

Paceset9999!

Way to go Paceset! The law of weighted averages triumphs over about 500 users with one entry for joining the site. To make next week even more exciting, we've added the ability to check how many tickets you have at any point during the week. Check it out from your "My Bonanzle" page. Since the giveaway resets each week, this week is an entirely new opportunity to put yourself in the driver's seat for a ONE YEAR TWO-AT-A-TIME NETFLIX SUBSCRIPTION. Damn do I wish I were eligible for these prizes...! Keep referring those friends and buying at will and you could be the next winner.

Above, the view for a buyer viewing their raffle tickets via "My Bonanzle." Don't you want to see what your computer-generated raffle ticket is going to look like?

Think Your Efforts are Working?

Many of our sellers (who I've taken to calling "The Bonanzle Booster Club") have lately been cooking up and executing ideas on how to spread the word about Bonanzle in the forums. For example: Here, here, and here, to name a few. Think the efforts are working?

These are our unique visitors per day over the last two weeks. 3000 unique users per day = almost 100,000 unique users per month, if the trend continues. A pace of 100k unique users per month would put us behind only eCrater and iOffer as the most visited eBay alternative on the Internet. We'd be in a dead heat with Blujay and eBid, two of the other marketplace bellwethers for many years. ... ALL AFTER ABOUT THREE MONTHS! The media might not have heard of "Bonanzle" yet, but it's becoming pretty inevitable at the rate you are finding friends and customers to join the community here. What a difference a grassroots effort can make! You guys are amazing us, and hopefully amazing yourselves as well.

You Know Best: Intro to Topic Tagging

Today's biggest change is one that I wanted to mention specifically, since I think it represents a huge step forward for the atmosphere of our forums. I introduce to you topic tagging. As most of you know, the Bonanzle forums are only the most happenin' place EVAR these days. We're averaging about 200-300 posts per day in the forums, with much hilarious, funny, and helpful banter being flung about. The volume of messages passing through the forums every day has already reached the point where Mark and myself are hard-pressed to read through all of it all the time. So the question we've debated amongst ourselves: how to make sure that the forums stay a friendly and positive place, even when we can't be there to keep an eye on them? Many forums pick a moderator or two to police threads, deleting as they see fit. We don't like that idea. First of all, because you're entrusting a lot of power to one or two people, and who's to say that those people are the best choice? Secondly, because it opens up the participants in the thread to get upset when the moderator sides against them and chooses to remove a thread. The solution we ultimately arrived at was to solve the problem the same way we solved the problem of "how to find the best items on the site." When you have 2000 (woot!) sleuths on the case, how can you go wrong? You'll now notice when you visit the forums that instead of that list of three online users in the lower-right corner (huh? why the heck was that there, anyway? :)), each topic has a list of tags that you can apply to it. A full explanation of what each of the tags does is right there, so I won't re-explain here. But the gist is that we're trusting you to be the best judge as to when a topic reaches the point that it doesn't reflect the upbeat spirit of most Bonanzlers. Once enough people agree with you (we're not giving specific numbers or details on our method of determining, since that would potentially allow people to game the system), the topic will either be moved or removed, and all will rejoice throughout the land. Thanks you in advance for your help keeping the scoundrels in check!

What do YOU think of Bonanzle?

Renowned marketplace expert and prolific blogger Randy Smythe today called Bonanzle a fresh and easy to use site with the soul of early eBay, and asked what its users think of it? Take a look at the article and submit your thoughts, if you're so inclined!

Hours of Trouble

Hola Bonanzlers! On behalf of the Bonanzle team, I'd like to apologize for the troubles that some had uploading booth pictures and figuring out our fees during the afternoon and evening of today.

In the event we should be unavailable in the future, Samantha will be all over them bugs.

Long story short: Bonanzle is being built by a (ahem... very) small team at this point, so despite our 6 day/week, 12+ hours/day schedule, there are still going to be clusters of hours where we are less able to be dispatched toward immediately fixing issues that arise. We ask for your patience during these interludes. In the time since Bonanzle's launch in early June, we have yet to have a period of more than an hour-ish where the site didn't load. To put that in perspective, AMAZON.COM's web services have had more downtime than we have had over the last few months. Think about their budget vs. ours, their team size vs. ours, and perhaps you begin to understand why we are so proud of what we've accomplished so far. Likewise, sometimes we will not be available to answer questions immediately. To this point, I think Bonanzle has been nothing if not a testament to the positive energy an Internet community can generate. But when that energy gets channeled into speculation, it becomes less useful. :) Be assured: If you have questions about Bonanzle policies, we will answer them. Should you speculate on the answers before we have time to answer them, chances are that others will speculate too, and as the Theory of Unfounded Speculation (TUS) dictates , eventually FUD overcomes reason and needless energy is wasted. That said, fees have now been clarified, custom booth pictures are again uploadable, and as usual, if you find other significant bugs, email support and they'll probably be fixed within a day or two. We do strive for perfection here, and when things aren't perfect, we're doing everything within our power to make them perfect, like, now. And now, back to our regularly schedule programming!

My Newest Favorite Trick

Bonanzle learned a new trick yesterday, and if you haven't already, you best try it out! You can now tell us what to do next. Practice your voting on Bonanzle before you have to do the real thing in November! Best to hone your decisiveness here before you get to the polls and freeze up in crunch time. The real question... which improvement is going to win out...? (Assumes horse race announcer voice) Combined shipping discounts shot out to the early lead, but custom booth categories coming up side, shipping discounts seems to be losing steam, booth categories flanking and gaining momentum, WYSIWYG description editor in third, WYSIWYG description editor gaining ground on the frontrunners, right now it's combined shipping discounts in the lead by a nose, followed by booth categories, WYSIWYG description editor, and more booth stats in fourth. Which improvement will win? The bookies are going to have a field day with this.