Hi from buzzmart

[TheFinBin]

Michael,

I've been reading this thread and I checked out your site. I must say that it looks great and it sounds like you're really making a lot of progress. You mention e-Bay a lot as a competitor for obvious reasons, but I was reminded of another potential competitor of yours called U-Pillar (upillar.com | Free Online Classifieds). Just a thought, but you may want to check them out. I'm sure there are elements on their site that you could approve upon and incorporate into BuzzMart.

Good luck to you.

Thanks,

Dave

 

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[buzzmart]

Michael,

I've been reading this thread and I checked out your site. I must say that it looks great and it sounds like you're really making a lot of progress. You mention e-Bay a lot as a competitor for obvious reasons, but I was reminded of another potential competitor of yours called U-Pillar (upillar.com | Free Online Classifieds). Just a thought, but you may want to check them out. I'm sure there are elements on their site that you could approve upon and incorporate into BuzzMart.

Good luck to you.

Thanks,

Dave

Thanks for the tip and the nice words. Upillar looks interesting, but again its classifieds, slightly different concept. Correct me if I am wrong but I dont see an inbuilt checkout system either. Neat website though, we are looking for a partnership, so a classifieds website would not be a bad idea. Today we are updating Buzzmart, its our last run of updates and we are taking a month off to do some brainstorming, gather feedback and get new ideas before we start another big phase beginning next year.

 

[DeletedUser394]

I'm going to start listing on buzzmart. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

 

[TheFinBin]

Sure, no problem. I wasn't entirely sure if you would consider it a direct competitor. I just remembered hearing about it and wanted to throw my two cents in.

Good luck with the brainstorming!

- Dave

 

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[buzzmart]

updates are complete, looks like the team and I can have a month off and relax a little while we brainstorm. We are still bug testing so if anybody from this board has signed-up and found anything nasty please give us a shout.

Another thing I would like to ask this board, as I am sure there are many sellers on this board, is if you have any suggestions, in other words what we should add or if you come up with any unique ideas we can probably implement.

 

[buzzmart]

Hi all!

Hope everyone had a great New Year and Holiday season. I know it has been a while but trust me the team and I have been very busy.

Just wanted to inform you guys that we have updated our marketplace with a ton of new features. One we are really proud of is a neat micro-blogging feature that allows our users to interact, promote and request products from Buzzmart and other marketplaces. We would really like your opinions on this new function which can be found as soon as you log into Buzzmart and is called "My Network".

Looking forward to everyone's replies.

Take care and I hope everyone has a prosperous 2011!

 

[sk24iam]

Hi how is it going,

I noticed that you updated your site to be compatible with google checkout which now compliments paypal and moneybookers. I'm curious why you took this route rather than setting up your own payment gateway and merchant account? I would assume doing it on your own would give you more flexibility and less fees.

 

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[CEBenz]

I'm curious to know what the prohibited items list is on Buzzmart. Also, how is the traffic looking?

 

[buzzmart]

Great advice! Thank you.

 

[buzzmart]

Hi how is it going,

I noticed that you updated your site to be compatible with google checkout which now compliments paypal and moneybookers. I'm curious why you took this route rather than setting up your own payment gateway and merchant account? I would assume doing it on your own would give you more flexibility and less fees.

You are right more flexibility and giving our users more options adds value to our website. PayPal, Moneybookers and Google Checkout seem to be the most commonly used payment portals for most ecommerce websites, so it was a logical choice to implement these.

I am not sure what you mean by setting up own payment gateway, if you meant developing something to compete with PayPal and the likes, then that is not something we are interested in doing. Not only because our focus in on developing the marketplace platform, but starting up an online payment gateway is a big deal and not easy to do.

 

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[buzzmart]

I'm curious to know what the prohibited items list is on Buzzmart. Also, how is the traffic looking?

You can find the prohibited item terms here: Buzzmart - Free social marketplace, bid, buy, sell & auctions click on the selling menu option and you will see "Prohibited and adult content goods"

We also expect our users to use some common sense as to what can and cannot be sold.

Regarding traffic, the last couple of months we had stopped advertising and marketing our marketplace as we were working on some new features that would secure our user retention. Having said that, traffic had dropped a bit but now that we are satisfied with our platform, we are going to start aggressively focusing on the marketing and promotion side of things now and less on the development of new features to the platform.
Nonetheless, we have some neat features we are coding right now and tweaking up the website where needed.

I do not know the exact traffic stats, I know page views are in the tens of thousands and we get an average of 2-5 new members a day, that is without any promotion but people finding us through search engines or word of mouth. We expect to see a big increase in traffic in the coming months starting as of now.

 

[buzzmart]

p.s. for all who are interested in selling on Buzzmart, you can now import all your eBay listings with just a few clicks and not pay any fees.

 

[sk24iam]

You are right more flexibility and giving our users more options adds value to our website. PayPal, Moneybookers and Google Checkout seem to be the most commonly used payment portals for most ecommerce websites, so it was a logical choice to implement these.

I am not sure what you mean by setting up own payment gateway, if you meant developing something to compete with PayPal and the likes, then that is not something we are interested in doing. Not only because our focus in on developing the marketplace platform, but starting up an online payment gateway is a big deal and not easy to do.

I meant compared to going through authorize.net with your own merchant account.

 

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[sk24iam]

also if you consider ebay a competitor, they are making money off of you since you are using paypal.

 

[buzzmart]

also if you consider ebay a competitor, they are making money off of you since you are using paypal.

Sure they are competitors, but we prefer to consider ourselves an alternative until eBay feels the competition :smxB:

Yes, PayPal does belong to eBay, and PayPal is the largest online payment provider at the moment. Hence, it would be unreasonable to not include PayPal as an option. We do give the choice of Moneybookers and Google Checkout as well.

 

[Red]

We also expect our users to use some common sense as to what can and cannot be sold.

LMFAOOOOOooooo.............. *

Just givin' ya a hard time there... but seriously... yeah, I laughed.

lol.

 

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[buzzmart]

Hi all,

Over the last couple of weeks our tech bods have been working extra hard on improving our service and we're pleased to tell you about several fantastic new features we have implemented on our social marketplace platform:

The Buzzmart Network

Besides improving the overall layout of the Network, we have included a neat feature which allows you to filter Buzzes by friends who are also connected with you on Facebook. You can now see which Facebook friends of yours are also using Buzzmart, making it easier for you to interact with people you already trust and find out what they are up to.

Furthermore, we have also added a function which allows you to connect your Twitter account with the Buzzmart Network allowing you to automatically tweet your Buzzmart activity to your followers.


A better look for your listings

Visitors can now view all listings either in list or gallery mode, making it clearer for buyers to find what they are looking for. Additionally, we have tweaked the way your individual listings look by re-arranging various attributes on the page and adding a zoom function to all listing images.

A smarter sell template

New features to the sell template include an automated image suggestion tool which fetches images based on the title of your listing. No more worrying about finding the right image for your products.

Furthermore, we have included the ability to add UPC, MPN, Brand and ISBN fields to your products so that your listings can get indexed by Google Product Search.

Personalized profile pages

We have improved the way profile pages display by bringing your listings to the top of the page and giving them maximum visibility which they deserve. You can also link your Facebook fan pages directly into your Buzzmart profile page and interact with other member using our Live Video Chat tool.

These are just the first of many fantastic improvements we have coming to the site, so make sure to check us out.


Best wishes,
George & Tony
Co-Founders