What's Been Going On

[gazza]

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 £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.

[gazza]

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

[gazza]

One of the burning issues for internet auctions is always the sale of replica and counterfeit goods. I read some posts on our forums about eBid "allowing" or "not doing anything to stop" the sale of counterfeit goods. As most of our users realise and have found out, this is simply not true. We remove hundreds of auctions every single day and with that the sellers of of these items. We are in constant contact with trading standards agencies and worldwide police forces and have helped with the arrest and subsequent conviction of many sellers of counterfeit goods in many countries. This is something I cannot talk about openly here. As well as this we have our own "IPIP" (Intellectual Property Infringement Program) system running that allows any trademark owner to notify us of any suspected fraudulent auctions which are immediately removed.

All auction sites around the world have the same problem when it comes to this matter, if someone could invent the "stop counterfeit goods being sold" switch that could be turned on and off and sell it he/she would be a rich person. The fundamentals of the problems lie far away from the daily dealings of an auction site boss reaching as far as :

Democratic and Human Rights
#The notion of innocent until proven guilty has been a pilar that whole nations have been built around.
#Who has the right to judge a person as a criminal?
#The fundamenetal basic ideas behind buying and selling have to be bought into question here, does a low price ALWAYS 100% Lead to an item being found as not genuine? Of course it doesn't. An authentic Louis Vuitton bag from 5 seasons ago might genuinily be worth £25 today, this defeats that idea that some people have that we can have robots searching for (Louis Vuitton with Reserve less than £25) and automatically removing all these auctions. We would be tarring innocent sellers.
#Is it up to the market landlord or the stall holder to police the sale of these goods? Should there be a second rule book created just for virtual instances of real world scenarios?

to

Foreign and Domestic Policies of some of the biggest and smallest nations on earth.
#Where are counterfeit goods manufactured?
#Who are counterfeit goods being manufactured by?
#Why are counterfeit goods manufactured?
#How are these goods being transported around the world?
#Do governments realise their countries are producing these goods? Do they turn a blind eye?
#Why isn't more done to stop the manufacture of them?
#Who should be doing more, who's job is it?
#Should individual countries be able to take financial action against countries where they are being made?
#Should individual countries be able to take physical action to stop their manufacture?

We've no plans to take over Kofi Annan in the next few months so many of these things are out of our control and as the internet is still such a new medium, many of the laws that would help and guide us in our decision making are still unwritten.

So what do we do? Stick to the tried and trusted policy that has been agreed on by the authorities that sees us act within todays laws, albeit restricting what we can do and not eradicting the problem or do we act as pioneers in the the world of e-commerce and online culture and help get to the root of the problem but risking putting some peoples' noses out of joint and treading on the line of people's basic rights?

Well, waiting on law makers to find solutions to the problem could be an endless wait and something has to be done much sooner that this. Are we the ones to take the lead? We are one of the longest established e-commerce sites in the world and have more experience of this than most people involved in the industry. So after working on things for the past 3 months and talking to many people we are shifting our policy as of this past weekend. To what?... I'm not willing to put this into words but time will be our judge over the next few months as our changes gradually kick into place.

One other addition we will be adding will be the addition of a new field to auctions that are started within certain categories, this will be a simple dropdown with "Authentic" and "Counterfeit" where users will be forced to list an item as being genuine or fake, thus circumventing the loophole that many sellers use to sell counterfeit items by not actually stating one way or the other. This will give authorities the key to making prosecutions stick on nearly every case brought.

That's all for now.
Have a Great Day.
Gazza

[gazza]

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

[gazza]

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.

Gazza

[gazza]

New Year always seems to be a lull with new members joining, but I'm glad to say we are now back up to where we were before Xmas now. Running at an increase of 100% compared to only 6 months ago.

Our new design is still in the works, everything looks very nice indeed, a clean, bright, simple and fresh approach that will make buyers want to stay and take a look at what's on offer. We'll keep you posted with that but not too long now.

Check out our HH auctions that eBid will be selling from today, the numbers and types of HH auctions we will be putting up all depend on the bidding activity but you can be sure there will be bargains a plenty.

Gazza

[gazza]

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

[gazza]

Been beavering away at intergrating our new designs into our template system. About half way there at the moment. I've left a quick note in the "Selling & Starting Auctions" forum about changes to our layout and auction descriptions. I will paste it below also.

Back to work.
Gazza

--------------

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 scrollber.

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.


Thanks
Gazza

[gazza]

Hi Everyone,

Hope you are all well. Thought I'd drop a line with some good and a bit of not so good news.. Whats first the good or the bad?

Let's go with the not so good.... We're not gonna be live with our new design in February. I was planning on putting up a nearly finished version of the site, but time has caught up with us now and I'm not willing to put up something I'm not completely happy with. As with everything that we seem to undertake we underestimate the amount of work that needs to be put into getting things through to the end, the smallest of things can take half a day to get to the bottom of sometimes, so... sorry about that folks but as with most things, first impressions are important and the speed that the internet has brought to people lives means judgments are made very quickly nowadays, so we will be holding back.

Now for the better news... The main reason for the change of plans is that we have 6 new servers winging their way over the Atlantic as we speak that we will be adding to our current 5 server setup to create a healthy little bundle of computing prowess that will take us to the next level of capacity allowing for larger bursts of new users that we have experienced recently.

We've decided to make the changeover to the new site at the same time as the new servers are put live to make only one period of downtime instead of two. The magic date I am pencilling in is the 15th March.

OK, a couple of other bits of news..

Today we should be passing the 400,000 auction mark for the first time, thanks to everyone who takes the time to list their auctions, it really is appreciated.

I'd also like to say thanks to all our regular buyers on the site and to all our new buyers who are finding their feet on eBid, you've all managed to increase sales on eBid by 50% in the last 2 months alone. Seems our advertising efforts are working and the magic word of mouth is getting a little louder by the day.. Seems the snowball is starting to roll that little bit faster..

Thanks again. Back to my perl scripts!

Gazza

[gazza]

Bad news everyone, was planning to set off to Docklands to oversee the upgrade and I've been told we have a malfunction in a piece of hardware (a refurbished LAN Switch) that we bought recently.

We can get a new one delivered tomorrow and do the update then but to save a couple of grand we are going to replace the faulty one with a brand new one being with us Monday, which means the update will now take place on 20th at 2am.

Sorry for the anti-climax everyone, these things never go to plan...

Gazza