The May Motherlode

Well, I guess this is what happens when you go a month without blogging when important things are happening every week.  Pitch your tent and settle in for a long one, folks.

Nice Sweet Talking

Thanks to everyone who played along with my Those in Favor of Alex list -- apparently the incredible turnout for the list was quite persuasive, for Alex has decided to join Bonanzle as our Chief Product Officer!  Thank heavens.  This means we're finally going to have somebody smart to ensure the usability of Bonanzle as it grows.  We will now be able to systematically test changes to make sure that, as we iterate, we build an ever-better product (rather than an ever-more random and cluttered one).

What's so great about Alex, you ask?  Well, besides more than 10 years of product-building experience at big sites like Wetpaint and Blue Nile, Alex caught my attention with his focus on making customers happy.  This is how Bonanzle has grown to its current size, and I believe it is how we will continue our rapid pace of growth.  On the flip side, it's also what attracted Alex to Bonanzle.  In his words:  "I talked to several startups in choosing my next project, but none of them got me as excited as Bonanzle.  First, I love transactional businesses.  And the fact that Bill & Mark have built Bonanzle to one of the largest person-to-person marketplaces in less than two years is commendable.  But what was most compelling to me is their focus on putting the customer first.  I am extremely excited for theopportunity to interact with the community and leverage their feedback to help us build a product that offers the perfect niche shopping experience."

Cheerio, jolly good mate, welcome Alex!

Item Importing+++

It was long past time.  It's been more than a year since we made significant improvements to our eBay importer, but improvements have finally arrived, and for those that use templates (Auctiva, Inkfrog, Seller's Sourcebook, etc) in their listings, you are going to notice a far different look to your items the next time you import.  Over the last week, we have added support for many more types of items and descriptions, and most critically, our HTML parser now allows the background/background-image attribute, which is the key to making most templates look right.  

If you import your items, and your items' descriptions use templates, we highly recommend you try re-importing sometime soon for a much more accurate representation of how your item description originally looked.  It still may not be perfect (Javascript, Flash, and external stylesheets still aren't supported), but it will probably be a big step up from what you're accustomed to.

Buyer Protection Pledge in Beta

That's right, this blog is so damn long that it takes two pictures to make it not look like a solid page of text

OK, so we weren't the first marketplace to have this idea.  Or the second, or the third.  But there's good reason why top-tier marketplaces like Amazon provide their buyers with programs like the A-to-Z Guarantee, and so we are formally launching the Buyer Protection Pledge in beta.  Initially, this program will only be applied to a very small subset of items from sellers who have earned a high level of positive selling feedback.  As we iron out the kinks in the program, we hope to allow it to apply to an ever-increasing number of items.

What does this change if you're a seller?  Not much, actually.  The Buyer Protection Pledge will function as an extension of the already-existing Order Resolution Center, which helps buyer and seller ensure that items get delivered and in the condition they were described.  The only difference with the BPP is that we will now officially stand behind our sellers where the BPP logo is shown, giving buyers an additional reason to trust this Bonanzle marketplace that they may have never previously heard of, if they're arriving from Google. 

Again, to be clear, during this beta period, the Buyer Protection Pledge will apply only to items where the Buyer Protection Pledge logo is shown on the item page.  Initially, this will be a small number of randomly chosen items.

Bonanzle Voted Seattle's Best Bootstrapped Startup

For anyone who was watching the live webcast of the event, my first (non-joking) comment to the audience was that we have a lot of users in the forums to thank for our victory.  I know that I only voted once, and there were more than 15,000 total votes cast, so to emerge victorious in such a heated competition means that some serious effort was put forth on the part of our community.  Way to go, dudes.  If you stop by BonanzleUp we'll be sure to present you with your trophy. 

Next Up?

From a company standpoint, one of our main objectives for June will be to continue to flesh out our team with a couple programmers and a full time designer/user experience pro.  From a features standpoint, we have many goodies in store, including adding a new system to better manage our customer support experience, easier registration, and updating some of our more jurassic pages to be more usable (yes, we're looking at you, "My Bonanzle.")  Thanks for everybody's continued support, it's been quite a month!