New Look in the Works
Hello our Summer-savoring sellers! I believe we have officially saved up enough topics to warrant a discussion of what's new and coming here at the 'ranch, so without further ado...
Riches and treasures untold await in every category
New Home Page Coming
Exact release date is currently unknown, but will be sometime in the next 1-2 weeks. The goal with our new home page is to present buyers with the items and sellers that are maximally relevant to them. While we love that our current home page allows us to showcase our community, it's largest failing is that it tends to fall short in communicating the breadth of inventory we have across categories like Collectibles, Books, Jewelry, and etc., since the hand picked list affords only a small amount of space to present items. Also, it doesn't do much to highlight our individual sellers.
In discussing how to improve this situation, we realized that our best bet was to let the shopper tell us what they are interested in, and give that to them. Thus, in addition to showing our user's hand picked creations, we'll be letting every buyer select which category (or categories) they are most interested in, and building an experience around their unique interests. In a marketplace that is built for a variety of different categories, we are optimistic that this will allow us to introduce buyers to items and sellers that they would have a hard time discovering in the Bonanza of today.
I'll post a separate blog on the launch of our new home page / header when we get closer to launching it, but since I know that many folks like advance warning about these sort of high-visibility changes, I figure it bears mentioning.
Fashion vs. Not
While sculpting the revised home page, we realized that the direction of this page ties into a larger discussion some of our sellers engaging in lately: does the new emphasis on personalization mean that Bonanza is going to be catering exclusively to the Fashion category in the future?
In a word (OK, two words): no way.
Bonanza is home to an impressive breadth of categories, with roughly equal proportions of items and sellers across many of our biggest selling categories (collectibles, crafts, jewelry, home and garden, beauty, and yes, fashion). We have focused from day one on building a platform that makes it easy to list items from any of these categories. We will continue to build our presence in search engines, while working to create destination landing pages that show each of our categories in the best possible light.
That said, we believe that the Fashion category in particular provides us with the perfect testbed for many of the shopping improvements (browsing by tags, personalization, enhanced filtering experience) that we can extend across our site as we prove that they work as intended. We have heard loud and clear from many of our sellers that would like to see Bonanza stay focused on driving traffic and sales, while letting the social/gaming elements take a backseat. While there is certainly some interplay between the social/gaming and traffic/sales dimensions, I'd like to personally assure our community that the aim of the improvements we are marking is very directly centered on building Bonanza as a shopping destination that brings more traffic to all our sellers.
But to achieve that lofty goal, we need to innovate. We have already succeeded at building a platform that incorporates most of the key features from "the big boys" (item traits, inventory importers, advanced batch editing, etc.). Now we need to challenges ourselves to push far beyond the status quo. That means we'll be continuing to introduce new ideas that haven't ever been tried elsewhere. Many of these ideas will probably require some polish before they are ready to be applied globally across all our categories.
Bottom line: we are confident that Bonanza is going to continue to remain an easy, cost-effective, and rapidly growing venue on which to sell all non-commodity goods.
And Lest We Forget... What a Month!
Christmas is coming a little early for many Bonanza sellers this year, as we've seen sales growth in August on par with growth from November/December of last year. In fact, August has been our highest growth of sales ever for a non-Q4 quarter. So thanks to everyone for continuing to post some of the most interesting and best priced merchandise available anywhere! We'll continue making it our job to help buyers find and purchase all the stupendous stuff that we've seen posted over the last few months.
<< Back
Recent Posts
Father's Day promo
Jun 3, 2025
An Important Announcement from Our Team
May 13, 2025
Cleaning House: How We're Cracking Down on Fraud to Protect the Bonanza Community
Mar 26, 2025
The Power of Optimized Listing Titles & Keywords
Mar 20, 2025
Spring Cleaning for Summer Sales
Mar 11, 2025
It's TIME! Bonanza's Annual Holiday Sale is coming up!
Nov 13, 2024Most Popular
Share
60 responses to New Look in the Works
Sounds like the end of Hand Picked Lists. Thanks for the warning, I will stop wasting my time today.
Thank you Bill. Looking forward to getting back to “everything but the ordinary”.
@johngermaine: Hand picked lists will still exist (of course), and still be featuerd on the home page. However, they will not be featured as the One and Only Thing on the page, as is the case today.
you had me worried that this site was gearing up to be all fashion oriented which would cause a multitude of sellers to become invisible in the main stream of the search results. It is good to know you are not going to do that to us.
Looking forward to seeing the new improvements~ Thanks for being the type of venue that considers input from the sellers who also do so much to make Bonz the destination we ALL want it to be. Your willingness to pool concerns and make positive change is very encouraging~ Thanks Bill~
Thank you Bill! Good to see your face again!
Thanks for the update. I look forward to seeing the changes as they unfold.
What is fantastic is the little bit of forewarning…It is to early to tell, if I like it as it hasn’t happened yet!
It will for sure be great when we move out of just fashion unto the other wonderful things that are also at Bonanza.
Sounds good to me. I like the idea of customizable home pages.
I don’t have the data to back it up but I have a strong suspicion that the increased summer sales have to do with our sitewide push to get everyone up to spec for the GPS changes. And heck, even if it doesn’t, many props to everyone for working so hard to comply!
Does this mean that we will see more tags for non-fashion categories and, more importantly, more RELEVANT tags? One example is the tags for books. At present, they are mainly for fiction books and there are few to none that are relevant to nonfiction books.
@CrystalBlue: Definitely. If you have been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed that even in the last week we’ve expanded the reach of tags into other categories significantly. And, as of about three days ago, we setup the ability to get more granular control over which tags show up in which categories. That said, we will definitely be working continuously to improve tag relevance (even if it can’t happen overnight).
sounds good
Thanks for the heads up. I, too, was worried that the variety here was going to take a backseat to fashion items. You guys have a really good community going and it’s nice to know that someone’s driving the show :-)
I’ll have to re-read your post. It will be nice to see more than over-priced ugly purses and shoes, and for some real items to be shown.
Waiting patiently!
Great blog. Thank you!!
Looking forward to it!
lol @cleo
I rarely ever see the home page. I don’t have any comments until I see what it is going to be. Thanks for the heads up.
Bill, It is so pleasant to read the information about the upcoming changes.
What I do truly love about this site is how much it has grown, and that you are looking to make it work for all sides. After all, Sellers are buyers too, and while I’ve been more of a buyer lately this has truly opened my eyes as to how buyers perceive so many things I never really noticed (even though I thought I knew it all, lol).
Still….I’m going to be a Bonanzle Fan…because the name in and of itself was so cool and unusual, but I’m not a stockholder (yet, wink wink) and I am jazzed to see how this all plays out.
I applaud you and your team for always looking forward, and reading what came before to keep this site what it is…. everything but the ordinary!.
I think this Christmas is going to be a banner year for sales!!
Lisa
It is always so nice to see you Bill. I will have been on Bonanzle/Bonanza for 3 years on Sat. I am absolutely amazed at how this site has grown and evolved. The community is fantastic and I could never say enough about you and Mark.
What a great idea to let everyone know ahead of time what is in the works. Some peeps get anxiety attacks about change they are not part of, I am so proud to be part of Bonanza and am looking forward to what happens next.
Sounds good.
Regarding sales. August to date, mine are higher than they were last August. Glad to hear I’m not the only one. Congrats Bonz.
Just keeps getting better! Thanks Bill.
Great. Looking forward to a improved homesite
thank goodness after all this time I would have hated to have to loose this site cause it turned to all about fashion I like it as everything but the ordinary
Way cool! I am really looking forward to seeing the new design..
Judy/blue
When looking for a ‘home’ for online sales, I perused most of the selling sites. I chose Bonanza because of the professionalism of the home page, which is of course, where I landed when I first found Bonanza. I was enchanted with the HLP’s and at the time of course, did not know that they were user created. I felt the site was sophisticated and fashion forward. I was impressed by the CNN quote and was able to see that the site offered collectibles, vintage, as well as fashion, by reading the categories under the HLP.
I had been a very long time online shopper, but had not sold online, and found the gateway to Bonanza most impressive.
My hope is that the changes are minimal, and that a potential buyer is not asked to fill out a survey of his/her interests, and have a page of collections pop up as IMHO, this is a turn off and quite intrusive. Today’s online shopper is savvy, and cost conscious, and knows exactly what they want to buy. Many prefer the anonymity of online shopping and not having ‘in your face’ sales personnel during the shopping experience nor do they have to time or inclination to fill out annoying questionnaires or surveys.
That being said, I too look forward to seeing the changes, hoping that they are sophisticated and tasteful.
I just want you to know that I would never buy fashion on line, and for that matter I’m not sure I would buy expensive jewelry or a chandelier. These are the types of things on the home page and although very pretty, I would rather be looking at home goods and unique items
And thanks again for all you hard work. Sorry about the comment on the picture, but I do think you should change it:)
Looking forward to seeing the new design, should be interesting.
Bonanza was founded on premise that this was the place to find “unique” and “everything but the ordinary”. I would love to see more focus on sellers who sell these types than those that sell the mass produced merchandise from drop shippers.
@hollys: Hmm, well what about this? Am I less creepy yet? Let me know… I am going to keep changing this danged picture until the consensus is that I am ravishingly handsome.
Thanks, that is sooo nice. Now I’m not afraid any more!
Here’s an example from HOABobbies booth
Where would you find something like this for Halloween? Unique, unusual and super cool. I would rather see this!
I thought you looked ravishingly handsome with the other pic the one with the hat this one now has to go you look tired and is that a zit on your nose?
Thanks for the heads up
Looking forward to seeing what you have up your sleeves this time.
BTW If I didn’t know how ravishingly handsome your were already I would never had said anything.
Beauty/Handsome is in the eye of the beholder. Put whatever pic makes YOU happy, on here Bill.
Looking forward to the exciting enhancements on the horizon!!
BTW, it’s Great to see your winsome face, rather than that wizened bearded guy!
Thanks – can’t believe I’ve been here almost three years too! I enjoy it so much and appreciate all things ways you’ve changed, tweeked and improved to make this a unique place.
Really looking forward to new changes. I surely do hope to see more exposure for the non-fashion world!
Thanks for the update! An additional comment…one thing I would like to see in the future is more stats. If sales increased in August, what categories specifically experienced the highest increase? Was it in clothing and back to school items, or something we wouldn’t expect?
Looking forward to seeing ANYTHING that doesn’t look like the Sunday newpaper inserts that are full of fashions. I never have and never will buy anything fashion related online.
Show me a can opener that my great grandmother would have used, show me a tool that my great grandfather would have used around the farm, show me my favorite toys from the 1950s. Show me something fun for a change, something that would make me say “oh wow, look at that”.
In other words, “everything but the ordinary”.
Amen, more of the ‘everything but the ordinary.’
Thanks for the headsup. I’ll be watching for it.
Wonderful news for books, antiques and collectibles. Thank you very much !…
always glad to see new features that may help out, though more buyers would be nice!
wiggling my Tabitha like nose
I cant wait to see the new additions and improvements. I can’t wait till the day that Bonanza hits a million members.
Great to see you Bill, and thanks for the great updates!
Thanks, Bill. I am hoping book sales will pick up with the changes
Thanks Bill I will be watching for the change.
Thank you, sounds good.
Drive more traffic in here.
Just getting the news as Irene disrupted my days leading into the weekend. I’m excited hope that it will lead to more people coming into shop. Hoping for a great holiday season.
Looking forward to the changes
ok Bill bring it on, if it will draw even more interest and of course pockets with money ready to hop from their’s to mine, I am all for it. Thanks for the hard work!
ok Bill bring it on, if it will draw even more interest and of course pockets with money ready to hop from their’s to mine, I am all for it. Thanks for the hard work!
Hi, everybody,
This is my first time to Bonanzle blog.
I am from Lhasa,Tibet, one remote,mystic,holly place.
If you like eco-friendly Tibetan handmade jewelry and crafts, pls visit my online shop:http://www.bonanza.com/booths/kindy,
Thanks for Bonanzle guys hard working.
Let`s work together, let Bonanzle more beautiful!
Sounds like Bonanza is heading in the right direction and I really do appreciate advance notice of pending changes. So many sites today simple make the changes and do not worry about the impact on sellers and buyers.
I really do look forward to continuing to be part of this wonderful site.
When will the new look, change ? I’m still seeing all fashion showing on the main pages, buyers are going to think this site is not what it says it is " Everything but the Ordinary", instead they are seeing it as All Fashion. Nothing wrong with fashion, but if I’m looking for tools I’m sure going to think I won’t find it in a site that shows All Fashion.
When you visit a site and all you see is one type of things showing, and you are not looking for that type, what do you do, you move to another site to hunt for what you are looking for. It is a mind set, If you walk into a Clothing store you don’t expect to see Hardware items, and If you look in a Hardware store you don’t expect to find any clothing, it is the same with the front page of any web site.
There has to be a variety of items showing on the main page, Hardware, clothing, tools, collectibles, vintage, toys etc… this gives the viewer the idea they just might find what they came her to find. It hurts the sales of those who are selling things other than Fashion items.
Even the newsletter from Bonz that I just received is almost 100% fashion. These promised changes can’t come soon enough for those of us that sell things other than fashion.
new look kind of blurry on FB
tapping toes, waiting, waiting…….
Login to see more comments