New NASDAQ inspired auction site Wigix launches beta

[mandy]

Wigix has launched a beta version of its site that it says
combines NASDAQ-style trading with a community-driven
marketplace. Sellers can list their item for any price, and
buyers have the option to pay the listed price or offer an
alternative price - both parties can accept or reject the bid...

full article: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y08/m04/i30/s04

Ars reviews the site:

The online marketplace for selling products is dominated by the old guard in the form of eBay, and the free guard with Craigslist. While there are plenty of other venues at which you can buy and sell goods from other individuals, newcomer Wigix mixes a little bit of Amazon, eBay, and crowdsourcing Web 2.0 tools to present a new kind of marketplace...

full article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200...hairs.html

Gigaom on the new site:

When it comes to online auctions I’m far more likely to be on the selling than the buying end. I am just not that into stuff. So I’m probably not the right person to evaluate a startup like Wigix, which launches its public beta today. The one-year-old business, which has raised $5.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson positions itself as a stock market for stuff...

full article: http://gigaom.com/2008/04/29/is-wigix-an-ebay-killer/

VentureBeat:

When an item is listed on Wigix, the seller won’t need to go through the task of describing it and posting pictures. Instead, they find the item in Wigix’s database, select it, and choose a price, with an eye to the average price.

Buyers, likewise, need only find the item they’re looking for through a single search on Wigix. Once they’re on the page for that item, they can see last prices it sold at, how many buyers and sellers there are, descriptions, reviews and more. If they want to buy it, they put in a bid price; when a seller meets the price, the transaction will be made...

full article: http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/29/wigix-...kill-ebay/

Ecommerce Guide:

Wigix charges no insertion fee, and any transaction less than $25 is free. Buyers are charged $1.50 when a purchase is made, but the seller pays depending on the amount, with a decreasing-sliding rate: $1.50 for a sale between $25 and $100; $1.50 plus two percent of the amount above $100 for a sale between $100 and $1,000; and $21 plus one percent of the amount above $1,000 for a sale of more than $1,000.

Sales on the site, for now, are handled through PayPal, and Chong said that there is a utility that eBay sellers can use to import their inventory, along with plans for custom storefronts this summer for Power Sellers.

The Wigix team also believes its search function is better than eBay's, providing results that are specific to the item, as opposed to eBay's, where results can often be unwieldy and include storefronts with unrelated products...

full article: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news...hp/3743561

the site: http://www.wigix.com/

[regic]

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Listing count after 1 day.

[amy]

When an item is listed on Wigix, the seller won’t need to go through the task of describing it and posting pictures. Instead, they find the item in Wigix’s database, select it, and choose a price, with an eye to the average price.

Amazon, Alibris, Half, Pricegrabber Storefronts, and many others are the same way.

The one-year-old business, which has raised $5.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson positions itself as a stock market for stuff...

A new auction venue that actually has funding. doesn't use boxed phpProBid or RScript software, and isn't run out of some boinktard's basement.  That's a positive.  ;D

[xwpopper]

Two big reasons it will flop:
#1 Paypal is mandatory... How can anyone claim to fight eBay when they require sellers to accept Paypal?
#2 The buyers pay $1.50 to buy anything over $25? Why would they pay the extra fee (not including what the seller upcharges for his fees) to buy from a seller on a site that they've never heard of?

I'd rather use Pricegrabber, or as much as I hate them, even Amazon.

[mandy]

Two big reasons it will flop:

Two more reasons:

1. Today's buyers demand a quick and easy buying process: Amazon and Zappos understand this - Wigix's designers missed the boat on this score and  the site lags behind even eBay on the buyer experience scale.

2. Social media/ecommerce mashups to date have largely been flops: MySpace Classifieds, Tagworld's late storefronts, Facebook ecommerce widgets and apps.  The social shopping buyer segment Wigix will appeal to is even smaller than the auction buyer segment eBay attracts.

[mandy]

Auctionbytes has a review of Wigix, Fididel, and Flippid

Three new entrants in the ecommerce space have rejected eBay's auction model in favor of systems that encourage haggling between buyers and sellers. And while the three sites take very different approaches, they all offer low fees and social networking components that are built in from the beginning.

Fididel actually introduces a middle-person into its ecommerce model - real-life human negotiators typing live at their keyboards. Flippid is more like a traditional bulletin board, letting buyers and sellers create and browse "BuyOff" and "SellOff" postings. Wigix takes an approach it likens to NASDAQ stock trading.

Flippid lets sellers offer a variety of payment methods, including PayPal. However, Wigix and Fididel both use PayPal exclusively...

full article: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y208...bu0215/s02

[mandy]

Auctionbytes article:
Wigix Marketplace Gives Triple Points for Referrals
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y08/m07/i09/s01

Not mentioned is the fact that traffic at Wigix took a dive after the effects of the early May news stories about its launch wore off.  Compete shows May traffic declining from 30,000 uniques to 9,000 in June.  Quantcast's traffic graph for the site looks like an inverted V.

[amy]

[quote author=mandy link=topic=17775.msg71205#msg71205 date=1215602816]
Auctionbytes article:
Wigix Marketplace Gives Triple Points for Referrals
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y08/m07/i09/s01

Not mentioned is the fact that traffic at Wigix took a dive after the effects of the early May news stories about its launch wore off.  Compete shows May traffic declining from 30,000 uniques to 9,000 in June.  Quantcast's traffic graph for the site looks like an inverted V.
[/quote]

translation: the current lack of traffic makes the site a complete waste of time for sellers

[xwpopper]

[quote author=amy link=topic=17775.msg71222#msg71222 date=1215642490]
translation: the current lack of traffic makes the site a complete waste of time for sellers
[/quote]

Worse now...
Wigix traffic has fallen to just 1300 visitors a month, ranking it lower than Yourhighbid (1800), Alsoshop (3000), Kaqoo (2100) and Hibidder (3200).
But, on the good side, Wigix still ranks higher than Pheebay with 820 visitors, and, get this, Ubidright with a whopping 87 monthly visitors! I'll bet those high priced investors are throwing a party now! 

[julia]

[quote author=xwpopper link=topic=17775.msg72694#msg72694 date=1222821585]
[quote author=amy link=topic=17775.msg71222#msg71222 date=1215642490]
translation: the current lack of traffic makes the site a complete waste of time for sellers
[/quote]

Worse now...
Wigix traffic has fallen to just 1300 visitors a month, ranking it lower than Yourhighbid (1800), Alsoshop (3000), Kaqoo (2100) and Hibidder (3200).
But, on the good side, Wigix still ranks higher than Pheebay with 820 visitors, and, get this, Ubidright with a whopping 87 monthly visitors! I'll bet those high priced investors are throwing a party now! 
[/quote]

Hello,

I am the Network Manager for Kaqoo - The Auction Alliance.

I would just like to make a point about the visitors listed above for Kaqoo, they are almost right! What the quantcast figures do not take into account is the Network Effect of Kaqoo as they are unable to see our figures. I am supplying this information purely so show that figures are not always what they appear.

All the sites in the Kaqoo Network are independent sites, including http://kaqoo.com, but each one takes the data from our servers from which we are able to total the visits and pageviews across the Network. Our brief figures for September were:

Visits 85445 - This figure is the numbers of users who actually visited kaqoo.com
Pages 12367696 - This figure is the number of pages we served to users at all sites across the Kaqoo Network

You will see a great disparity between these figures as the first shows the visitors to kaqoo.com and the second, the number of pageviews at all sites in the Kaqoo Network.

To see some of the sites in the Kaqoo network please see this link:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ad...Fkaqoo.com&bwm=i&bwmf=a&bwms=p

The upshot is that Kaqoo users receive hundreds of pageviews from anywhere within the Network of over 1000 sites; it doesn't just have to be at kaqoo.com.

With 12 million pageviews a month, if aggregated by quantcast, Kaqoo would be probably the largest alternative venue. Most people just haven't cottoned on yet!