Thursday, January 15, 2009
The latest developments at a handful of e-commerce sites
Just two days day after Jim Cramer opined that the bar of entry is sufficiently high as to be an insurmountable impediment to any real rival to eBay and Amazon, word surfaces of significant developments at a quartet of businesses trying to emerge as exactly that. From ECommerceGuide.com:
As December tuned into January and a new year, several of the more popular eBay alternatives announced site changes, new features and upgrades for sellers. Here we look at who is doing what to encourage traffic and business on their alternative selling sites.
One well-known site, Etsy, the online marketplace for all things handmade, has made several site enhancements that include several new seller tools. The site's shop feeds are now pre-formatted for easy upload to Google Base, Etsy added shipping and address data to sellers' CSV download file to provide better information on the status of orders and it has also completed beta testing of Etsy Web Analytics, which is provided through Google Analytics.
This new release allows Etsy sellers to track metrics such as page views, site visits, popular content and page referrals. The best part? It's free for all sellers.
iOffer.com recently revamped its Web site and included a better search engine with category images and links laid out to make site searching easier. There is also a new "Current Activity on iOffer" that will display current member negotiations along with a section to show buyer ratings.
Atomic Mall, which launched several months ago, is now a selling base for nearly 6,500 members. Current listing numbers are closing in on 120,000 and Atomic Mall has now added Amazon Payments as a new option for sellers and buyers. Also, Atomicmall.com has joined as an official venue to Repatoo.com, a site that allows online sellers to use their service as a central "storage facility" for their user feedback from every selling venue they use. Other changes this month include new hosted server hardware for faster access.
In another interesting bit of news this week, eBid.net recently gave away $2,500 to the seller adding the two millionth listing in December, and now says it's ready to award $3,000 when it hits its three millionth listing. eBid's co-founder says that sellers are joining ebaid.net in record numbers. The site claims it currently has close to close to 2.4 million listings across 9000 categories.
Like many alternative sites, eBid is encouraging new sellers to join its online community, but in all the alternative news bits we've perused thus far, very few of these marketplaces are doing much, if anything, to reach out to buyers. Hopefully as we get into this year a bit more we'll start to see some of these alternatives churn out more buyer incentives and show more (non-seller) member growth.
Just two days day after Jim Cramer opined that the bar of entry is sufficiently high as to be an insurmountable impediment to any real rival to eBay and Amazon, word surfaces of significant developments at a quartet of businesses trying to emerge as exactly that. From ECommerceGuide.com:
As December tuned into January and a new year, several of the more popular eBay alternatives announced site changes, new features and upgrades for sellers. Here we look at who is doing what to encourage traffic and business on their alternative selling sites.
One well-known site, Etsy, the online marketplace for all things handmade, has made several site enhancements that include several new seller tools. The site's shop feeds are now pre-formatted for easy upload to Google Base, Etsy added shipping and address data to sellers' CSV download file to provide better information on the status of orders and it has also completed beta testing of Etsy Web Analytics, which is provided through Google Analytics. This new release allows Etsy sellers to track metrics such as page views, site visits, popular content and page referrals. The best part? It's free for all sellers.
iOffer.com recently revamped its Web site and included a better search engine with category images and links laid out to make site searching easier. There is also a new "Current Activity on iOffer" that will display current member negotiations along with a section to show buyer ratings. Atomic Mall, which launched several months ago, is now a selling base for nearly 6,500 members. Current listing numbers are closing in on 120,000 and Atomic Mall has now added Amazon Payments as a new option for sellers and buyers. Also, Atomicmall.com has joined as an official venue to Repatoo.com, a site that allows online sellers to use their service as a central "storage facility" for their user feedback from every selling venue they use. Other changes this month include new hosted server hardware for faster access.
In another interesting bit of news this week, eBid.net recently gave away $2,500 to the seller adding the two millionth listing in December, and now says it's ready to award $3,000 when it hits its three millionth listing. eBid's co-founder says that sellers are joining ebaid.net in record numbers. The site claims it currently has close to close to 2.4 million listings across 9000 categories. Like many alternative sites, eBid is encouraging new sellers to join its online community, but in all the alternative news bits we've perused thus far, very few of these marketplaces are doing much, if anything, to reach out to buyers. Hopefully as we get into this year a bit more we'll start to see some of these alternatives churn out more buyer incentives and show more (non-seller) member growth.
posted by Chris and Frank at 12:01 AM
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