TulipTools Internet Business Owners and Online Sellers Community

Pages: 1 2

Quote:What's Been Going On
Afternoon everyone,

Just a quick note to let everyone know the latest goings on behind the scenes.

We've taken on design firm 301.co.uk on a 3 month basis to undersee the redevelopment of the entire eBid identity from logo to website design, functionality, useability and language flow. We are currently about a month into the project and we can't wait to get the new site up and live. Our design has always been our main downfall and this is the first time we have employed professional designers to help us. Before now we have not had the revenue to do this and everything has been done in-house (well... by me!). The first main change I am looking for is the frontpage, this is where people first land and a huge percentage of the overall perception of a business is made within the first few seconds, we want to and will get this right. We need users to feel at home, welcomed, interested and to be able to find what they are looking for quickly and simply and to make the purchase process as smooth as humanly possible. I hope our new design will get fix our achilles heel once and for all and let the handbrake off our growth rates.

We have been doubled our monthly advertising spend from around June and have increased the number of keywords we are bidding on on Google by 2100% since June, rising around 2000 per day at the moment. We are targetting buyers and bidders as a priority and are seeing numbers of bids rise daily.

We have invested around another Â£10,000 in computer hardware to make us faster, more stable and with a larger capacity for growth. As we grow we will invest more and more to cope with demand but as many of you know we do not have any large financial backers as yet and all investment is based around our income, the more we take in the more we can spend on advertising, computers, design, support staff.

This isn't to mention all the website functionality changes that we have in the pipeline, these are too numerous to mention but some will start to appear within the next few weeks, these changes aren't related to our new design and will be placed live once fully tested and deemed ready.

Myself and Mark would like to thank from the bottom of our hearts everyone who has stuck with us and remained positive through the "slower" times and we hope the upcoming changes will prove worth it.

Gazza.

http://helpdesk.ebid.net/showthread.php?t=88716

Update:

Quote:The site updates are coming along, testing is going well. We are aiming to have programming done by the end of the weekend and then full testing for around 7 days before we launch the new facilities... We have tried to incorporate the most requested changes, hopefully most of you will be appreciate the changes.

Some of the changes are

Scheduled Auction Starts
Scheduled Auction Closes
Fixed Price Listings (no bidding)
Sell until Sold
Customer Invoicing
Full checkout system
Multiple item capabilities
My Favourites daily emails
View counts dont count seller views
Reset view counts on repost

Many of the new capabilites will be available to our new "Professional Seller" level of "Platinum". Hopefully many of you will upgrade to Platinum when it becomes available, we'll be offering incentives to upgrade for a 7 day period when it first goes live.

As with anything in life, I expect some of our users will be resistant to change but I would like to let them know that we have thought very long and very hard about the changes and see them as the gateway to allowing us to become a mainstream site in terms of the amount of sales being made and the ramp up of our levels of marketing in both number and quality whilst allowing eBid to remain excellent value for money.

Best Wishes
Gazza

http://helpdesk.ebid.net/showthread.php?t=88716

The latest update:

Quote:As ever, things are taking longer than hoped for with the programming and changes to the site for our next upgrade. We are working round the clock and have just about ironed out every single annoying creepy little bug. No doubt some more will raise their ugly head before the end of the weekend, but things are looking good for a launch within the next 7 days.

I have a meeting Thursday at 12.30 with our designers who will be unveiling to me, after 2 months work, the first versions of our new design. They sound excited and have told me it is some of their best work. In an ideal world I will fall in love with it at first site and eBid will be that bit closer to being the best designed auction site on earth. Luckily, there is little competition here, with the likes of QXL, eBay, BidVille and Overstock hardly hitting the extremities of excellent design even with the money they have access to. With eBay I have always felt it has was a case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". Users are happy with the way it works so they have little reason to change things drastically. In a way we are lucky because our design "is broke" so we must fix it.

We have always made a little money go a long way at eBid out of necessity more than desire but with our new design eBid will become the place that I always hoped it would be, a place where users can browse endlessly and swiftly, find what they are looking for quickly and buy in a simple and swift process that will make them come back time and time again and get those all important recommendations to friends and relatives.

Our policy change in regards to counterfeit goods has tripled our daily auction removal in 2 weeks. Our thanks go out to those who are reporting more and more possible counterfeit auctions every day using the report mechanism on each auction details page, and with the addition of some extra options when listing new auctions that are in the pipeline we should really be getting to the bottom of the problem in the near future.

Thanks All..
Happy Xmas Shopping....
Gazza

http://helpdesk.ebid.net/showthread.php?t=88716

The latest update.

Upgrades to Platinum membership are free for many (most) existing lifetime Gold membership users. Platinum membership adds the following benefits: Customer Invoicing System, Grouping Multiple Auctions, Access to PayPal Checkout for their Buyers, BuyNow Only (Fixed Price) Format, Run Until Sold (Store Inventory), Free Multiple eBid Stores, Scheduled Starting Times, Scheduled Closing Times

Quote:Our next upgrade will be taking place on 16th at 00:01, I've left more explanatory note on another thread in this forum. Take a look at it and I hope most of you will be taking advantage of our opening offer.

All our "founding" members who joined us when it was virtually free to upgrade will be given the full credit of £44.99 as their base to put towards their upgrade, so that gives everyone about a week to upgrade for free.

The meeting with 301.co.uk went well, they have cottoned onto our requirements very quickly and have given us an exciting fresh site layout and logo. They are now working on the individual aspects of the 7 areas of the site we asked them to redesign and have told me to expect final results in mid Jan. It will take a couple more weeks to incorporate the new designs, layouts, colours, graphics and functionality into our templating system. As with most things, this is the perfect scenario and i expect things will take longer as they always do but the result will be worth waiting for and bring in a whole new dawn for us all.

http://helpdesk.ebid.net/showthread.php?...post442042

Latest update from eBid

Quote:Hello All,

Though I'd drop everyone a line to let them know the latest goings on..

The designs are done, they are sitting in Photoshop as we speak just an Alt+Tab away from me! I'm tempted to put up images of what they are like but that would spoil the surprise.

Other than that, we are implementing some behind the scene changes to our database and memory management to speed things up over the whole site, the bigger the database gets and the more users we have the more resources we need to run things and those things cost money!! Thanks to the platinum membership we will be purchasing another server soon and also start our first foray into merchandising, first off the printer will be personalised car stickers with your eBid username and link to your store. We are also planning our first "professional" foray into PR, we have dabbled a bit before but it is something that requires constant attention and until now myself and Mark have been unable to give it that, in fact it has been neglected due to our commitments to building the site and keeping up to date with support.

Anyway, thats it for now, back to Photoshop.

TTFN
Gazza

ps. I'll put the scroll piccie up soon!!

xx

http://helpdesk.ebid.net/showpost.php?p=456268&postcount=7

Upcoming changes to auction description width:

Quote:Been beavering away at intergrating our new designs into our template system. About half way there at the moment...

Quote:At our upgrade users will see that auction descriptions will show up to 614 pixels in width. Anything wider than that will result in a scrollbar.

A couple of users have images and tables that are wider than 614, this is just a heads up so that you may want to make a couple of changes to your descriptions in new auctions that you start in preparation for the upgrade.

http://helpdesk.ebid.net/showthread.php?...post459495