eBid Marketing Challenge!!

[ToyCrazyUK]

Nicking nykmedia's promotional ideas , I think it would be good to have another £1 no reserve promotion. If it could be supported by eBid through their newsletter, so people who don't use the forum see it. We could have a code in the description so people could go straight to the bargains. When people see stuff listed at a start price of £1, they bid for it even if they don't really want it! For this promotion, I would like to see the '60 minute auction' area changed to advertise the 'eBid for a Pound' items. A link to take you to all the listings, plus either one of those film reel type picture bars which you can scroll along, or random pictures of relevant items in the promotion. EBid would lose the income generated from the '60 minute auction' listings, but if only gallery items were shown on the homepage, then they should hopefully get the income back from the final value fees.

I can't take the gamble of listing my items for £1 normally, as they don't get enough hits, but I would be willing to put a load of items up for £1.

We could run this up to Christmas.

I posted this idea earlier on in the forums. I would still be willing to post a load of my items at £1 NR, as long as long as the promotion got some front page coverage.

The auctions finishing tonight can all be found by searching with the code TCBB

[alyak46141414]

Earlier in this thread I made the point that if a reasonable number of eBid sellers agreed to risk just one 99p listing each week of an item realistically valued at £5+ we could easily make eBid far more appealing to buyers inside a week than the next 100 months of Google Adwords spend combined. The feedback on that idea has been what?

Maybe I'm dense but I don't understand how this is going to draw new buyers to eBid.

[*artsbanquet*]

I posted this idea earlier on in the forums. I would still be willing to post a load of my items at £1 NR, as long as long as the promotion got some front page coverage.

The auctions finishing tonight can all be found by searching with the code TCBB

I feel that this idea would only work if the 99p start auctions had a dedicated space on the front page - that would sort of "bring them altogether" and create more impact.

[nykmedia]

I think it refers to 'must have' bargains, the ones we know as loss leaders. Unfortunately these only work within an environment where buyers are browsing to buy more than one item. Low, no reserve starts certainly encourage new visitors if you promote them off site, I have my own proof on that one, having listed a brand new Nintendo DS at £1 no reserve. However, there are always opportunist buyers (I am one of them and am not ashamed to admit it) who will ONLY buy bargain items, or items that they need. We need more opportunities for browsers to make 'impulse buys' when they visit eBid. To get them, we need more sellers who can be relied on to offer a wider choice of affordable goods and to get them, we need more visitors to the site and a wider network of links into the site. This is where the RSS feeds and better affiliate scheme will come into play. This is also already in the pipeline and, therefore, not part of what eBid is hoping for with their 'challenge'. Right now, the only way forward with this is if each and every serious seller had their own web site and each of those websites was dedicated to eBid.
PS: I think it's great that you are initiating a US based network of sellers to offer joint promotions. Community networking is a great free way of marketing.

[kengillam]

There are also sellers such as myself whose items are not the usual impulse style purchases, neither do they carry low cost itims that they could use as loss leaders. The technique of having a lot of cheap bargains may attract new signups so they can bid, but whether will they be long term users of the site is difficult to say. Also you still have the problem of advertising the fact that there are these fantastic bargains to be had on eBid. I would like to think that ebid has enough good value items (not neccessarily cheap) all the time to attract buyers. It is the 'getting them here in the first place' that we have to crack.

[HelenAndGraham]

Gazza and Mark are spending £2,000 a month on Adwords then that's one hell of a lot of click thru's coming here each month. If the average cost per click is 20p then that's 10,000 visitors the Adwords are getting here to eBid.

So, despite this excellent volume of visits, why are buyers not as active as we would like them to be? Aren't they stopping or returning after the Adwords ad leads them here?

Why would that be?

[*artsbanquet*]

Gazza and Mark are spending £2,000 a month on Adwords then that's one hell of a lot of click thru's coming here each month. If the average cost per click is 20p then that's 10,000 visitors the Adwords are getting here to eBid.

So, despite this excellent volume of visits, why are buyers not as active as we would like them to be? Aren't they stopping or returning after the Adwords ad leads them here?

Why would that be?

It's probably because there currently just isn't enough choice or variety of goods available. If buyers can't find what they want here, why would they bother signing up?

Secondly, it may have something to do with the ease of the sign-up process. That's why I feel that there have to be incentives for browsers to sign up - like a competition to win hard-cash for eg. Once they've signed up, that's one hurdle overcome and it makes it easier for them to buy.

[ToyCrazyUK]

Things I tend to want to buy are computer games and DVDs which have not been out very long. Whenever I've searched for these, there have either been no results or the only results were more expensive than buying new through a store.

Thinking about the google adwords - Gazza, can you publish a list of all the things people put in the box 'where you heard of eBid' for, say September, or is it data protection and you can't show it? I like my statistics and I am happy to go through them and put them into some sort of categories. There may be some surprising answers which could help up target our advertising.

Also, we've got another thread running where rednosty said he'd advertised eBid on the carousel at the airport by putting parcel tape around his suitcase. Similar to our idea of a viral ad competition, how about a photo competition? Bluebedouin has made the first photo

If we get lots of landmarks 'eBidded' and post them online, when people search for the pictures of famous landmarks on google, our images should come out as well!

[HelenAndGraham]

I really don't see name awareness ideas for eBid as being particularly necessary or wise to concentrate on at the moment. Particularly if they have any cost attached.

There are probably something like 10,000 visitors being attracted to eBid each month already by exisiting advertising and only a tiny percentage of those visitors are sticking. This is the root problem.

A very large percentage of visitors obviously don't rate the experience here as being good enough to stick around. So why compound that problem? Surely it is better to find solutions to the basic problem and start converting sales to the visitors you are already attracting? Then you know an increase in visitors will translate in to an increase in sales.

The previous point made about 'choice' is very valid. Where possible gaps in product availability need to be filled if there are the sellers capable of doing that. But, regardless of that, all sellers should be checking their competitiors at eBay to ensure what is listed here on eBid is equally attractive and competitive in the eyes of any new visitors.

Sellers here may not want to view eBay but most buyers will and it takes no more than five seconds to move from an eBid listing to carry out an eBay search for the same item. What will they find? Will they return to eBid to conclude a purchase? Why not do those searches yourself and find out?

I fully appreciate there are always exceptions to every rule. I understand Ken cannot risk a work he has spent days and days labouring on for 99p. But Ken does list photos and other less expensive items that could be used to loss lead??? And, as much as he's certainly no fan of eBay, I'm confident Ken recognises that his sales results would be far better on eBay for his more expensive works. Why? Because that's where the buyers are courtesy of an overall better and more competitive market to browse.

You can sell at healthy prices and you can shift specialist, slow moving items if there are a regular flow of potential buyers walking past your shop window every day.

Anyone having difficulty understanding why 99p no reserve auctions for GOOD items dramtically improves the buyer experience should maybe switch off the PC at Xmas and take a wander around the January sales in the local high street. There are many levers available to retailers to increase buyer activity. By far the most successful year in and year out is price.

Shop in Tesco or Sainsburys and you will usually pay much more than you need to for a joint of beef, piece of fish or whatever. But we are slaves to convenience now. The vast majority of us cannot be bothered with trolling the high street trying to find a butcher, green grocer etc. So, because we are in Tesco to buy the majority of our cans, packets, tin foil and loo rolls we blindly pay through the nose for our meat, fish, vegetables, fruit etc.

The supermarkets have built hugely profitable empires by basically conning us that they are cheap via loss leaders and creating a huge and attractive browsing experience. They know that a 10p can of beans will sell twenty less competitively priced items once the buyers are in the shop with their wallets and purses out. And look at the money and effort the supermarkets spend getting people in to their shops.

Many supermarket buildings are leased from property companies. I've yet to see a property company advertising on TV telling us to go shopping in the supermarket their tenant is running. But sellers here seem to think it is totally Gazza and Mark's problem to pay for and organise advertising? Sure they need to advertise eBid but for a totally different reason than our need to advertise our products.

So if we accept any responsibility to advertise our own products, we need to make sure the advertising is pushing something that is likely to sell.

But if we think the venue is supposed to promote our goods and generate a high level of sales for us with minimal promotional effort on our part, we should seriously consider moving back to eBay where they charge the fees necessary to do a lot more promotional work for us.

[*artsbanquet*]

"Surely it is better to find solutions to the basic problem and start converting sales to the visitors you are already attracting? Then you know an increase in visitors will translate in to an increase in sales."

Totally agree with this. The problem now is not that not enough people know about EBid, but that those who do know and do visit, aren't buying.

I can think of a couple of reasons for this.

1. Choice
2. Price of items
3. Convenience

Of all things, I would say it's mainly choice and convenience. Price obviously does play a part, but many sellers do list at lower prices here (although not all do) I promote my website and my Ebid store equally, but I sell a lot more at my website. It's probably because my website doesn't require a registration process - it's just click, click, click kachiinggg!

Choice - yes. How many of us have wanted to buy things here, but simply because they weren't available, had to buy them off E*y?

To compare prices on different websites, for those of you who don't already know, this is a useful tool - www.auctionalfie.com

So basically, the crux is that, our marketing should not just be targeted at getting people to know about Ebid, but there should be some incentive to join and register.

The photo competition idea is great!