New Token-Earning Opportunities

Have all the categories and traits now been completed?

With apologies for seeming obtuse, but I still cannot understand the purpose of the product catalog. Would one not surmise that the listings with photos and price as displayed are in essence an online catalog of available product?
Perusing the new online catalog utilizing varied search queries displays photos with no prices, inaccurate counts of actual items available and mismatched title to product.
What am I missing?

I too am very disappointed that you have stopped the tagging option. By participating in the tagging, I was able to discover sellers and items that I would not normally have come across otherwise. As for my own items, most of what I sell is antique or vintage or one of a kind. Not the kind of item that lends itself to a mass product review! So where does that leave me traffic wise? Another point you might consider, if folks get tokens for finding a review helpful, there will be a lot of reviews getting marked as helpful even if they aren’t, or even if the person is unfamiliar with the product. I just don’t see this being particularly beneficial to sellers that sell in the antiques or OOAK categories. I hope you will reconsider and restore the tagging option.

Well that just plain stinks! (IMHO) Tagging helped bring views to my booth, and gave me an incentive to visit other sellers and peruse their products. Once again, Bonanza disappoints me.

Really, didn’t anyone else see this coming??

I agree with DesertDaisies.

Why does everything always seem to focus back on handbags? I guess that makes the handbag sellers happy, but I do believe there are other sellers here with different products. What happened to Find Everything but the Ordinary? Is Bonanza looking to go the EBay route and get rid of all the small sellers who sell OOAK and only cater to those who sell mass produced items? If less time was spent on bizarre ways of searching and more time was put into taking care of seller’s concerns maybe there wouldn’t be a torrent of bugs to fix.

Tagging has been so frustrating of late with so many of them not showing up. You’d view an item and it apparently had no tags. Cool. Check one off and get that great message “tag has already been approved by the seller”. Tagging was taking way too much time for me. I guess I just found another hour in my early mornings. (Ooo, I can not get to work earlier. What a concept.

Amazon allows reviewers to write reviews on items not purchased, as long as the reviewer is a member of Amazon and has made at least one purchase. Reviews are marked Amazon Purchase verified for reviews where the purchaser has actually purchased the product. They also had and may still have a program where they would send top reviewers free books and ebooks in exchange for reviews.
I am with CritterCreek as I do not understand how this works on Bonanza.

The only things I read anymore in Blog comments and also on Community pages is negative things going on. Are you guys actually taking any note of this? Or are you just zapping the comments and going about your merry way? It is very sad what has happened here. The downward spiral just continues and gets worse everyday.

I think we should stick to the basics already established, explain them simply and get what is already here to work properly. We don’t need to try to reinvent the wheel every few months.

@Mark, As far as I know, the only way to remove that link from our listings is to upgrade to a premium booth. If this is not true, please let me know. However, this does not address Amazon showing up in Bonanza searches. As shown below, that current feature can only hurt us.

As for getting “Like items” showing up in google organic (where most buyers find their search results) something must be wrong as “Like items” only comes up for the Bonanza items. My eBay and Etsy items show up correctly in organic.

Perhaps, it’s reflective of something in the coding for our listings that is causing this when the spiders are indexing our items.

Can we change that to write a review on active products though? What good is a review on something that already sold? The stuff I sell is different than others. Most of the items I sell you cant just go in a store and pick up, so I only have 1 to sell. That dont benafit me at all. Also giving tokens to the buyers and not the sellers? How will the buyers use tokens to help them with fees or other services? Dont get me wrong, I think its a good idea to help promote items but I think it just has to be tweaked a little.

Jimmy

From what I understand, the reviews on Amazon can only be written by someone after buying the product. I’ve clicked on “reviews” on several items here that I am familiar with, thinking I’d try my hand at writing a review, but it takes me to Amazon and says the item is not in the catalog and then proceeds to show me other unrelated items…what am I doing wrong? I’m willing to give this a shot but its so much more complicated and seems to be taking me away from the site. ?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that there are effective and ineffective ways to be critical…regardless of who, or what entity, is being criticized or doing the criticizing.

When I’m criticized in a negative way – “How could you be so WRONG???” or “What in the world were you THINKING of???” or “That’s just plain DUMB” or all of the variations on that theme…I tend to shut my ears, open my mouth, and try to defend myself as best I can.

When I’m criticized in a more measured, positive way – “That’s interesting, but have you considered this?” or “I’m not sure I understand that, could you please explain?” or “I have a problem with that idea and my problem is…” I’m more likely to listen and think things through…and even, sometimes, come up with a different decision.

That said…

I’ve read a lot of the negative kind of criticism and not nearly enough of the measured, positive kind here, and in other places.

Are there things I think need changing? Yup!

I’ve communicated a number of them to you, Bill and Mark, through emails to support, the most urgent (for me) of which are the changes in category structure and the attributes problems, especially those affecting Google Product Categories. And I’ve got to agree that it seems to me preferable to finish fine tuning one thing before going on to another.

However, there are also a lot of things I really like about Bonanza.

I really like the fact that management is open to communicating with members, and will in fact give us thoughtful, personal, un-canned responses.

We may not always agree with your responses, but at least we GET them.

That’s more than can be said of many other sites on which I’ve sold.

I like the fact that you’re willing to try to work through problems with members rather than simply ignoring them.

I like the site itself – the ease of listing, the access to stats, and all the little, technical things that make my life, as a seller, much easier.

That said, I really don’t understand the concept of the product catalog. And I’m not sure how it will benefit me, since I’m primarily a seller rather than a buyer.

Perhaps if you could explain the thought process of how it will benefit the site … and therefore us as sellers … it would help us get behind the effort in a way that seems not to have happened up until now.

Another thing that would ease my moments of frustration a good deal would be an acknowledgement that product categories and attributes are in need of fine tuning and some time frame as to when that might be accomplished.

All in all: I’ve sold on a number of sites and Bonanza is by far preferable for me to all the rest. I’d like to see the atmosphere change to where we can all work together – management and sellers – to make it even better!

quoting bharding “Forums and blog comments tend to amplify this dislike of change, because happy people have less to say (and so often stay silent).”
So I believe this may hold true for reviews often too, so what makes one think then that reviews will be written unless they are unhappy. Like others mentioned here, for those that do OOAK things, I am hesitant in believing this will be a big benefit

Sometimes you hear the complaints of something like no more tagging or other things and I understand you try and please those people, but you are not hearing the other side of people that are happy with the situation. I understand that you cant make everyone happy, but maybe in the future there would be a better way to find out who would like the change and who wouldnt on any subject. Maybe a section where we could vote? Not just on new subjects, but on subjects you want to do away with as well. Like tagging. Just a idea.

I remember when tagging was first rolled out, we all had this new toy to play with. It was fun to go visit other booths and tag and browse (and buy). As time went on and tagging glitches became apparent, and then got even glitchier, it was less and less fun. Less fun because of the glitches, and because so many of the tags were useless and not applicable.

I do thank you for the savings I received on my monthly bills from tagging.

I do agree with other posters here, and just do not understand how you can catalog and pigeonhole all items, especially unique vintage and antique items.

Even the few reviews I have come across don’t seem to make sense, don’t really fit. For example, I put in “Candlewick bowl” in the search box. Results come back with two reviews, one for Campbells soup bowls, one for an Imperial bowl. Neither of these are specific to Candlewick bowls, which is what I was searching for. When clicking either review, it takes me to a list of all kinds of bowls, and takes me away from the original search for a Candlewick bowl.

How is this going to improve anyone’s search experience?

It seems this catalog stuff is far from being ready for prime time, with millions of items on bonanza.

As far as Google search:

How about fixing it back so that items in google organic take a potential buyer directly to the item page? Or at the very least, please put a link that says see item description, as eBay has.

" That said, those paying attention know we have a multi-year track record of listening to specific ideas and improvements and incorporating them into Bonanza. "

Well said Bill, that’s exactly what we need here, a lot more decisive Management , your clear statement is well taken , that there are too many time wasters here.

however several of my previous comments weren’t published on your latest blog, Server issues I assume.
I’m so pleased to find that you are taking all of this so seriously , and since you appear to be so receptive , perhaps you would be good enough to respond to just another one or two minor questions .
1, Google updates are imminent , please best describe how you expect to accommodate their latest requirements, the present “FALSE” attribute is causing some difficulty for your sellers.
2, Please describe how you are addressing the problems regarding multiple attributes resulting in using the Bonz Duplicate " feature."
As I’m sure that you are already aware , this also results in Google refusing the listings.
3, Please let us know how well advanced you are with basic searches, esp. regarding isbn’s ( which are added as a matter of course ) to our item listings. At the moment , they are not searchable .
4, Many sellers do not use calculated shipping , due to well documented problems on this site.

We welcome your comments and any news of progress on these issues and naturally any information will be of the greatest assistance in our report to ECommerce . They are always eager to print the latest updates from Bonanza .
sincerely , William
William.

I agree with DiscountSewingSupply. Tagging was an opportunity for fellow Bonanza sellers to come into my booth and become Bonanza buyers. But, the tag possibilities supplied were sort of useless. If the tagging system wasn’t working perhaps the types of tags should have been re-examined. I don’t exactly remember the tags available for books but I remember being frustrated while trying to tag books in other booths and there were no appropriate tags to use.

Or clothing…‘modern mom’ or ‘modern dad’? Really?

Thanks for all you are trying to do and thanks for being reachable. We may not always agree but we can communicate.

If reviews are written by a purchaser (for a catalog item) it would appear to mean the buyer – as reviewer – would be the one to get the tokens. I understand the value of tokens for a seller (reduce fees) but of what value are they to a buyer who is not also a seller?

I know I’m missing something here.

I agree with DiscountSewingSupply about the nonsensical aspect of the Tag names; I never understood how “genre-bender” or “guilty pleasure” would be an asset to book sellers – etc. etc. Many of us suggested myriad times more appropriate Tag names. I still believe it could have worked if the Tags were appropriate “search words”.
jsgeare has a very good point – it is the BUYER who reviews, correct?
I too must be missing something important -(?) Please ’splain. Thank you

I got your last question answered in the discussion forum, js. Here’s the link to the actual reviews; you have to scroll down to see ones with text.

http://www.bonanza.com/product_reviews

Wait wait! Maybe the SELLER gets the tokens? That would make sense.

Among discussions on tags in the forums in the past, it has been said that (by sellers themselves) if the tag “is close enough” that they will accept it or they will accept a tag because they do not “want the seller to lose out on their tokens.” Looking at the big picture, this is not beneficial to the buyer and though one person may carefully watch how they accept tags, someone else will not. I understand the heart behind that logic but I’m looking at it as what is the buyer thinking when they search under that tag. Search already has a lot of choices. I’m not sure how I will feel with the product reviews. I’ll find out when it gets rolling. Yes, it is also true that we could have used more choices in tags.