Seller Survey 2014: Results & Actions

We'd like to extend a huge thank you! to all our sellers who participated in this year's annual seller survey. After gathering data for a few weeks, I wanted to share what we learned, along with the actions we plan to take in the coming year to respond to your input and keep Bonanza's distinction as "the most seller-driven marketplace" online.

Where you're coming from

Bonanza was born in a multi-channel world, and that trend clearly continued in 2014. Here are the other marketplaces you used during the past year:

The largest contingent of Bonanza sellers are those active on eBay. No big surprise there. More interesting is Amazon's emergence as the runner-up platform, now representing almost half as many Bonanza sellers as eBay. I believe this is a testament to having built a toolset that can handle the needs of both small and large stores. With all the great merchandise listed on Amazon, we are excited about the opportunity to provide an increasing number of Amazon sellers with a platform that's more affordable and less anonymous. The key to repeat customers is to build a relationship with the buyer, and we will continue to help you cultivate those relationships.

As we refine Background Burner Pro over the course of this year, I suspect our Amazon contingent will grow further still, since the burner provides an essential missing tool for sellers that post their images to Amazon (which requires white backgrounds). As you'll read below, we've got big plans to improve photography this year, both for Amazon sellers and for merchants in general.

What takes time?

This question ties directly into Bonanza's Core Mission: to spread the joy of entrepreneurship, minus the busywork. What busywork kept you busiest in 2014?

The top five time-suckers are 1) taking and processing pictures 2) finding merchandise to sell 3) shipping 4) managing and locating inventory and 5) determining price for your items.

So many exciting opportunities for us to reduce your busywork lurk in this data.

The highest "bang for the buck" time savings lie in making it easier to take pictures and get them into your listings quickly. This makes a lot of sense, when you break down how many hoops the average seller has to jump through to get a single item's pictures in place. Roughly speaking, you must setup your photo room / lighting; position the items; take pictures from various angles; review whether each picture has the proper lighting & colors (re-take if not); transfer the pictures to your main computing platform; browse the import folder to collate images with items; adjust colors/contrast as necessary; remove picture background if selling on Amazon (or seeking to maximize item conversion rate); login to however many platforms you sell on; and upload the groups of pictures for each item, separating out the item's main photo from its other angles. It's exhausting just to read all these steps! But the reality is that this routine has to be repeated hundreds or thousands of times as a new store is being created. Little wonder that so much time gets spent on photography.

One of our main goals for 2015 will be to reduce your time spent taking/processing item photos by half. We believe that we can automate almost all of the steps listed above. In particular, I believe Bonanza has the opportunity (and the tech talent) to create a mobile experience that can combine with Background Burner Pro to get studio-quality pictures posted to all of your selling channels in about one minute per item. That is one of our audacious goals for the year.

Shipping is another area we can help. We've taken a big step in that direction during 2014, with the addition of shipping labels purchased & printed from Bonanza. But making sure you have the materials you need, and making it easy to schedule your pickups are both opportunities that could reduce the time you spend prepping and shipping. (Not to mention streamlining the process between making a sale -> being ready to print a shipping label).

Determining the right price for items is an area we've already started work on, and one we'll continue to progress on throughout 2015. There's no reason that sellers should need to manually research similar items when we already have the data to find similar items and provide a price range and confidence interval. Determining the best price for an item shouldn't take more than 10 seconds, and should be automated.

Finally, while communicating with buyers barely missed the "top 5," I think that, too, is an area Bonanza has a lot of room to improve during the coming year. Providing automated responses, and allowing frequently asked questions to be saved with products can save sellers time and help buyers get responses faster, increasing conversion.

Bonanza Support

Another question we asked users was how satisfied they had been with their Bonanza support experience over the past year.

It ain't perfect, but it's pretty darned good, with about 80% of responding users saying their experience was great! It looks like we have some room to improve in making clear how our response relates back to the original question, and trying to be as specific as possible with our answers. On the whole though, this appears to have been a pretty great year for Mark and his team of happy little elves.

Webstore Traffic & Sales

We also asked sellers to give us input into how they drive traffic & sales within their successful webstores:

With this data, it's clear that, along with rapidly increasing the number of themes available, the biggest opportunity to improve webstores this year will be to ensure that stores get quickly and effectively indexed into search engines as new items are posted.

"Integration into other shopping engines," and "allowing social media campaigns to be setup" are other webstore opportunities we plan to explore in detail as the year progresses.

You've Got More Ideas

This is what makes our selling community so awesome: the freeform feedback we get when asking how to make the platform better. Here were some of the top ideas we heard.

It's all about the sales, dummy

There's never been any doubt that sales are the reason you are here. It's the reason we're here, too.

All the efforts that we make to improve Bonanza must ultimately lead back to you making more sales, and earning more profit. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to free up the time you would have spent on some non-profitable task (e.g., taking pictures) so you have more time to work on the parts of your business that generate new customers and increase sales (e.g., finding great merchandise).

Sometimes the best way to generate more sales is to add new buyer channels, as we have done throughout 2014, and will continue to do in 2015. Most notably, our Bonanza Affiliate program will be kicking into high gear this January. For participating sellers, we expect to see sale increases in the 20-40% range by mid-year.

Yet another way we'll be growing sales in 2015 will be to dive deeper into mobile. While the mobile-optimized version of Bonanza already drives conversion above the industry average, there's no reason we can't make our mobile site into a destination for buyers who've got a couple minutes to kill at some point in their day. We'll be experimenting with many ideas in this vein over the coming year.

More advertising

More than ever before, Bonanza has many options to experiment with different types of advertising in 2015. Over the past year, we spent about $1 million on advertising through the various buyer acquisition channels we support (Bing Shopping, Google Shopping, Nextag, TheFind, Pricegrabber, etc). In the year to come, we plan to dig deeper into exploring the non-online channels that can increase Bonanza's brand presence and get our sellers direct buyers.

We plan to have a Marketing & Advertising Manager hired by the end of January 2015, whose chief role will be to help Bonanza use its growing advertising budget to find more buyers in more places.

Better options for shipping

In many ways, Bonanza has been a leader in shipping - having offered "calculated shipping" within months of our launch (the first marketplace after eBay to do so), and shortly thereafter growing to allow international shipping, various shipping speeds, and built-in purchase of shipping labels. But because shipping is such a critical piece of a positive buying experience, we'll continue to focus on adding new shipping types that reduce your cost and increase your flexibility.

Other ideas you want us to investigate during the coming year:

• Better seller analytics
• More intuitive batch editor
• Improved item variations
• Mobile app
• More webstore themes

Not to mention all of the feedback we get via our standard feedback site.

You're the Boss

Without the input you provide us in our annual seller survey, plus the ongoing feedback you give us in our collection of feedback forums, we could have never built Bonanza to what it is today (the most recommended online marketplace).

It a gift that you care enough about Bonanza to take the time to tell us what you think. It is a gift we don't take lightly. As with last year, we hold ourselves accountable for delivering the features you need. We will provide a report later this year to analyze how good we've done at delivering a better & more profitable selling experience using your ideas.

2014 was an incredible year for Bonanza. Not since the first year of our launch (2009) have we seen sales grow at the rate they did this year. Sales revenues are up more than 300% between last December and this December, even though our count of sellers has increased by "only" 50%. This means the average active seller on Bonanza is making almost twice as many sales as they did a year ago. How did we do it? By combining your feedback with our action-oriented culture.

In Other News

Stay tuned in the next couple weeks for several more features from the Feedback site to get moved into our list of "Completed Features." With the crush of the holiday season behind us, we've got plans to launch some of the bigger+cooler user requests we've been working on.