Switchboard And All Else New

After a very busy month of February (sporting more sales than the height of Christmas season!), we're very excited to welcome in March with a collection of new news, features and updates.  Here's all the latest.

Switchboard

Thanks to more than 1500 users who turned on experimental features over the last week to get a glimpse at the new Bonanzle Switchboard and help it get some heavy beta testing under its imaginary computer belt.  After ironing out many of its initial kinks, we're now turning it on for all users to enjoy.  You can get the full rundown on how it works by reading our help page about the Switchboard.  We think this will prove, over time, to be a great tool to stay connected to all of the real-time happenings on Bonanzle at any given moment.  

If you have ideas about notifications that you'd like to have available in the Notifications section (i.e., when someone enters your booth, when someone includes you in an HPL, when someone leaves a post in a topic you recently started) feel free to drop your ideas in the comments to this blog and we'll look them over to see what would be popular.  The potential for usefulness here is limited only by our creativity.

And if you're low on screen space and would prefer not to have the Switchboard present, you're welcome to either hide it entirely (click left icon and then "Customize Switchboard," then choose to hide it) or you can hide it except for when you receive new quick texts.  If you hide the Switchboard entirely, your quick texts will pop down from the top, with no history and no user avatars, as quick texts have worked in the past.

Roundtable Questions

When we ask ourselves "What differentiates Bonanzle from other marketplaces?" the answer we always come back to is how engaged and helpful our community is as a whole.  But for many buyers (especially new buyers), they might never realize this great resource exists, or may never know how to leverage it to its full extent.  

Enter Roundtable Questions.  While this feature is still officially in "beta," we are looking forward to a future where buyers will remember Roundtable Questions as a reason to visit Bonanzle directly when they want to get an answer on tricky questions about clothing, collectibles, home & garden, or any of the other non-commodity categories that our sellers expertly understand.  So far the average Roundtable Question is averaging 10+ responses, so there is certainly plenty of knowledge to draw from if ever you need a specific question answered.

In addition to being accessible from the People page, Roundtable Questions can also be found through search and the Switchboard.  Currently, we are trying to focus on merchandise-specific questions here, though we may expand it to allow for Q&A about Bonanzle itself in the future.  For now, though, questions about Bonanzle itself are best discussed in the forums or through our support.

Other News

Our efforts to get Bonanzle advertised through accessible and cost-effective channels are progressing, albeit at a pace that is slower than we had hoped.  Our business pro Chad has been working tirelessly to get this setup over the last month, though, and he hopes for it to be arranged and online within the next couple weeks.  Some of the overhead of getting it setup the first time -- such as creating the ads themselves -- is one-time work that will hopefully take less time in subsequent ad campaigns.

As for a sneak peek to what's next on our roadmap:  redesigning some of our older pages (yeah, we're looking at you, My Bonanzle page and Offer page), usability testing of the new buyer experience, and more measures to make buyers feel safe upon their first visit.  Onward and upward we go!