The Bonanzle Boys have been hard at it again, their blog reports another fistful of site improvements arriving alongside the workload of keeping the site stable during the pre-Christmas peak. Most of the improvements are stated as having come about due to user requests.  Full marks to them.

Amongst completed improvements are -

• Checkout 2.0 – Many sellers have hoped for some steps to make checking out easier. They are finally getting their way, with more than 10 small and large checkout improvements put into place. These include:
  • Removing one of the three screens (shipping) from checkout for repeat buyers offers
    Clarifying the payment screen
  • Eliminating the need for buyers to choose between Paypal or GC on the first cart page
    Calculating shipping based on the offer’s shipping location (rather than the user’s home location).
  • Bill’s apparently hoping to add in a couple more improvements such as a custom invoicing system.
• HTML view item page is now default - One of the most common feature requests was to make item descriptions default to html display (as opposed to plain text) when new buyers visited the site, and this has now been made default – hurrah!
• Billing screen improvements - the boys admit that not only was the Bonanzle fees page ugly, it was also confusing and it failed on basic functions basic things. It’s had a face lift, and will soon have an automatic billing option added negating the need for sellers to visit it every month.
• Remote chat improvements - Gmail, Yahoo, MSN Messenger and AIM are now available although apparently MSN and AIM still go AWOL from time to time.

Further additions due soon include -

• More checkout improvements.
• Automatic billing
• Optional enrolment into affiliate program (drives traffic to your items from bloggers and other sites) for those signed up with automatic billing. (More details to come)
• Hopeful unveiling of that one plan to get a thousand more buyers per day injected into site (in 1-2 weeks?)
• More social features, when Bill gets to choose what he wants to add.

As you can guess if you keep up with the BuildaSkill blog, I’m pretty excited there’s finally an affiliate program arriving for Bonanzle.  Not only is it a hot product to market right now, it’s overall take-up, though impressive for its age, is still a tiny fraction of overall potential, which gives it a long-tail earning opportunity for affiliates.

I must confess though, Bill’s blog comment has me a little confused – I’m not sure if the program will be for promoting the site, or whether the site is going to act as an agency for individual sellers who then have marketers promoting the sellers’ wares and the sellers pay for the sales acquired.  No doubt that will become clearer over time.

A Word of Caution from Bill

USPS has been quite the dullard lately when trying to calculate shipping rates — sometimes taking long periods to calculate shipping, sometimes not calculating rates at all (I’ve checked on our end, and all is well in the request we make to USPS). In cases where shipping can’t be calculated, buyers can still make an offer to seller, but can’t buy items immediately, since USPS won’t tell us what shipping price to charge.

Tales of woe in trying to use even USPS’ own site lately are well chronicled (on our forums and elsewhere), so especially during this busy holiday season, I’d recommend flat rate shipping prices (or UPS) if it is possible. I’ll be continuing to monitor the availability of the USPS services over the next couple days to see if it improves, but lately their availability has been quite spotty indeed.

It would be interesting to have USPS’s take on this – whether it was infrastructure overload, or a glitch in the system. Personally I suspect the former. Remember the server-load would have been coming from both post office counters as well as individual online users, and API-connected websites like Bonanzle.

Ed