Buy.com launches Marketplace program for 3rd party sellers

[amy]

Positive: the seller with the lowest price gets the buy box on the item page which is better than on Amazon where Amazon is always listed as the seller on the listing page and you have to click on a link to see offerings by 3P sellers.

Positive: far fewer competitors than on Amazon.

Negative: the number of SKU's in their CD catalog is only a fraction of the number of titles Amazon offers.  I've yet to explore the DVD and consumer electronics categories to see if they suffer from the same limitation.

[mandy]

TT member #278 lands a new job. 

On Tuesday, January 27, I begin a full-time consulting arrangement with Buy.com as their Merchant Evangelist.

My role with the company will be to reach out to third-party merchants and introduce them to the platform, solicit feedback on what merchants need from the marketplace and work on ways to drive sales to Marketplace sellers.

I will serve as an advocate for merchants within the company on product management and marketplace issues...

full announcement: http://www.myblogutopia.com/2009/01/rand...y-job.html

[xwpopper]

[quote author=mandy link=topic=17626.msg73896#msg73896 date=1233050636]
TT member #278 lands a new job. 

On Tuesday, January 27, I begin a full-time consulting arrangement with Buy.com as their Merchant Evangelist.

My role with the company will be to reach out to third-party merchants and introduce them to the platform, solicit feedback on what merchants need from the marketplace and work on ways to drive sales to Marketplace sellers.

I will serve as an advocate for merchants within the company on product management and marketplace issues...

full announcement: http://www.myblogutopia.com/2009/01/rand...y-job.html
[/quote]

Will he will be working hard to convince sellers to try Bonanzle anymore?
In all seriousness though, he has plenty of experience as a merchant, although not with eBay for nearly 4 years, so his liaison position may work well. Just curious though, how will he lure new merchants to a site that operates one of the largest stores on eBay?

[bargainbloodhound]

how will he lure new merchants to a site that operates one of the largest stores on eBay?

Buy only accepts businesses with tax IDs which eliminates 90% of OAI forum posters so Buy's eBay store probably won't even be a factor. The sellers whose business decisions are primarily based on emotion ("I hate eBay/I hate companies that help (or benefit from) eBay", "I joined site X because it's fun")  probably don't meet the requirements to join.  C2C (aka P2P) sellers (the average PSU seller) might regard Buy's eBay store as a huge strike against it, but B2C sellers are unlikely to care about it.

[amy]

I can think of 4,126,168 reasons why he shouldn't have any trouble getting merchants to add Buy Marketplace as a channel.

Or put another way, Buy's December traffic (4.1m) was one million more than the combined total traffic of eCrater (1.3m), iOffer (1.16m), Bonanzle (187k), Blujay (156k), AtomicMall (69k), Wigix (66k), Plunderhere (37k), Wagglepop (33k), OnlineAuction (61k), ePier (39k), Silkfair (31k), Bid-alot (8k), Usiff (7.5k), Alsoshop (7k), Wensy (7k), AuctionQuests (5.3k), YourHighBid (4.5k), Auctions8.com (4k), HiBidder (3.2k)

[sneakymagenta]

Buy.com reported 146% year-over-year sales growth for its retail Marketplace, which currently has more than 11.5 million product listings from thousands of third-party sellers. Buy.com's Marketplace comprised 46% of orders in the fourth quarter of 2009 and more than 50 percent of orders in the first quarter to date.

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y10/m03/i05/s03

Buy.com has 11.5 million 3P listings, Amazon has over 2 million 3P sellers and more listings than eBay.  Sellers on both sites never have to deal with PayPal.

message to (some) sellers: STFU already with all of the "eBay has a monopoly whine whine whine", "if only there was a viable alternative to eBay and PayPal whine whine whine" crap