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Thread: What's Been Going On

  1. #11
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Morning everyone,

    We have just put live the first tentative version of our new site, after weeks of grafting we realised it would be another month at least before it was finished so we have put up a version we are happy to let you loose on. There are more tweeks and additions to come that we are still working on and will be for weeks to come, please let us know of any glitches you find.

    We were hoping do a large hardware upgrade at the same time as putting the first version of the site up but time has prevailed again and no hardware upgrade has happened as of yet. We hope to have this done within the next 2 weeks. We will be doubling our number of servers overnight and most importantly will be tripling our database power which has always stopped us from being fast enough to catch the eye.

    Have fun exploring, and try not to judge until you've bought and sold to see the changes we've made so far.

    Thanks.
    Gazza
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  2. #12
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Well, that was the longest couple of days in my life, but the site seems to be running pretty smoothly now.

    I'm as white as a sheet and my belly is growing a little too fast for my liking, thats what happens when you sit at a computer for about 8 weeks non stop. I'll be glad to get back to my normal routine of only 20hrs a day squinting at the screen!!!

    As we carry on with the site improvements and hardware upgrades we have been stepping up our marketing in the background, one thing we're missing in our marketing blerb is a new strapline, a few worded sentence that will attract a buyer or shopper as soon as they hear it. Why should they shop on eBid and not anywhere else? We want eBid to be a one stop shop for anything anyone wants to by, the worlds biggest department store and market stall all at the same time. "Free to Bid Free to Sell Free to Enjoy" doesn't tell the right story really.

    If someone wants to start a thread we'll put the best suggestions in a poll and give out buddy points to the winner and a 3 runners up.

    I'm taking an hour breather now, if no-one has started a thread before I get back I will arrange one.

    Thanks everyone for your help in debugging the site so far.

    Gazza
    Last edited by gazza; 21st March 2007 at 07:59 PM.
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  3. #13
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Hi All,

    We'll be sending a newsletter out over the weekend to announce our new look. Make sure you have the newsletter option turned on in My Emails to receive it.

    We've got 3 PS3s to auction in Happy Hours next week, 1 on Tuesday, 1 on Wednesday and 1 on Thursday. Bidding starts from £10 with no reserve as usual. Tell everyone you know who wants one to come and have a bid next week.

    On a more important front, we are seriously thinking of changing the minimum auction length to 3 days simply because the more astute of sellers have realised they are near the top of the listings much more often than others. 3 days will give more variety to the listings.

    Also we're getting our first batch of flyers designed and printed very soon, I was wondering how many people people may be interested in each to get an idea of the size of the print run. They are going to be 1/4 A4 size.


    Thanks.
    Gazza

    ...we also now have 2 Nintendo Wiis for HH on Wednesday and Thursday.
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    Last edited by gazza; 23rd March 2007 at 12:55 PM.
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  4. #14
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Hi Everyone,

    We've been cracking on since we updated the site to the new design. As I mentioned before we invested in more servers to help speed up and give more capacity to the website allowing many thousands more visitors to use eBid without anyone noticing a decrease in site performance. We've started using some of the new servers to run our database in replication now so that will increase capacity straight away, they went live about 30 minutes ago we will be adding the other new servers very soon to spread the load some more.

    We've been fixing some of the bugs that people have been pointing out to us over the past few weeks as well. these have just been uploaded also, some more fixes are still being worked on.

    We've been working on the re-design of the forums also, that should be ready pretty soon.

    I mentioned elsewhere that we are starting to work with a London based PR agency to raise the profile of eBid via UK television, radio, newspaper, magazine and online media. PR is something we have tried on a small level with freelance PR consultants before but it has always been way beyond our budget but we now hope to run a professional PR campaign alongside our online advertising not instead of which would have been the case a year ago. Again everything depends on income, the more we take in the more we can spend.

    Another change will be a change in the methodology of our auction listing process, we will be allowing Silver (non-subscribers) to use some of the facilities that have been reserver for our platinum members, this will not be free, but after listening to many sellers there is a definite need for full auction selling facilities for users without a subscription.

    Back to Work!
    Gazza
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  5. #15
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Hi again everyone,

    Thought it was about time I should drop a line to let everyone know what's been going on over the past couple of months.

    It's been a very hectic time to say the least.

    Firstly we had a very unexpected hardware failure on one of our servers. Luckily alrady had a backup system in place so that we did not lose all of our 3/4 million photos we have stored. The problem was instead of slipping a new disk into the slot we had to transfer everything over a very slow USB connection which ended up taking a few days. My heartfelt thanks go out the emergency guru Stephen D. who spent 48 hours with me with no sleep getting this fixed. Please spend your money wisely.... you put me on bread and water for 2 months!!!!


    We mentioned a few months back that we had entered into a deal with a PR company to finally give eBid some professional public relation to get our name into the mainstream and to get people talking about us. Well, this deal fell through when they changed our account manager 3 times in a month so we gave up. But, I'm glad to say that we have now signed with another PR company, this time through recommendations and am proud to say they started work for us on a years contract on 1st October 2007.


    The eBid site as a whole has been a little unsteady over the last couple of months. The main reason for this is the growth in users and also a few bugs that reared their heads after some major updates. Accesses to the database are becoming greater and greater meaning longer queue times. We have been building our hardware infrastructure over the past few years. We now have enough servers to help us grow to the next level but if these servers aren't running to their full potential then there's no point in having them. To help us with the wait times and to get pages loading lightning fast we now have on board a database team experienced in the field we require. They are going currently through our setup and we hope to see the eradication wait times over the next 2 weeks.


    We're proud to announce we have our first batch of Official eBid Merchandise now for sale to our loyal customers. Caps, t-shirts, mouse mats, car stickers, tax disc holders, mugs and pens are now available for Buddy Points via our eBid Store


    To enable us to release a newsletter on a regular basis we have taken an editor on board to produce the newsletter each month around the 20th. They have produced 2 newsletters so far that have gone down well. Don't forget to add donotreply@ebid.net to your contacts/address book to stop eBid email being sent to your spam folders.


    Gazza
    Last edited by gazza; 2nd October 2007 at 10:41 AM.
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  6. #16
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Hi All,

    We've been cracking on this week with the changes to our software to enable the site to run faster with none of the page waits that have been happening for the last few months. We're about half way through the changes, the main sticking points are our category browse pages, they are still loading too slow, we will crack on with these.

    We have a list of another 20 bug fixes and additions that are also being worked on as we speak. Including invoice re-sending, exporting failed bulk upload, google checkout bugs, custom start date problems.............

    We had a 50% off offer for Seller+ Lifetime membership over the last week, thanks to everyone who's taken advantage of the offer. It's open till midnight tonight so don't wait if you're dithering!

    We had a meeting with our new PR company yesterday, things are cracking on with them. I must admit that after all the time we've been running eBid, it is so nice to have a professional outfit working with us. They are working on a survey as we speak that will be used for news stories, the first of which is due for release this month. Fingers crossed....

    We will soon be adding another marketing aspect to the site. We will be expanding our Buddy Points system to include monetary payment for Seller+ Lifetime referrals. The exact amount hasn't been finalised yet but it could be up to 50% (thats £50 or $50 for each referral you make). We hope this will persuade a large amount of our members to help promote eBid using their own ideas and creativity to get the word out about us.

    On the same note and in response to the many criticisms we receive about our lack of marketing, we'll be toning down our online advertising for a month and the £2000 we save we are offering this for our users to spend for marketing eBid. It'll be interesting to see if we can get a better return on this money than Google and Yahoo can give us. How it is spent is up to the eBidders who take up the challenge. It is both a marketing idea and a chance for our community to get their claws into something that might interest them... I'll start a thread soon that this can be discussed on (if no-one else does first)....

    That's all for now.
    Back to Bedlam.

    Gazza

    ps. if anyones looking for a new album, i'd recommend The Cribs, Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever, kept me going for the past week!
    Last edited by gazza; 10th October 2007 at 01:50 PM.
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  7. #17
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Morning Everyone,

    Hope you're having a good Saturday morning. Its been a few months since my last musings were aired so I thought I'd drop a few titbits as to what's going on in the background at eBid.

    I'm glad to say the site has become much more stable and page load times have decreased over the past couple of months as we have implemented about 10 separate ideas to help with this. The technicalities I won't bore you with but I hope you have noticed the change with no pages hanging for more than a couple of seconds now (apart maybe from My eBid summary pages for our largest sellers) and individual auction pages loading in a flash now. This is great for bidding wars enabling last second bids to be made without the frustration of hanging pages whilst the last few seconds of an auction wittle away.

    The increase in site speed and reliability has helped us retain more users and create better word of mouth from first time users as we are seeing increase sales month on month since June of this year. The exact figures for eBid UK are an increase of 57% in number of sales in November 2007 as compared to June 2007. For eBid US the figure is 221%. One of the factors for the increase is the inclusion of certain auctions on Google Products. If you wish your items to be included in our uploads make sure they are :
    1) Legal
    2) have a BuyNow price
    3) Have at least 7 days remaining OR are On First Bid OR are Run Until Sold at 5am on the 8th, 18th and 28th of each month.

    We are into our 3rd month of a 1 year contract with our PR company and are about to release our 3rd press release under them, The first two have given us a little coverage in the UK but we hope for more and more as the year goes on.

    We are currently working on our API. This stands for Application Programming Interface. Basically it brings the innards of our website out into the open and allows access to the fuctions of the eBid by third parties. This will enable outside developers to create add-pns and stand alone software applications that allow you to do what you currently do on the eBid website away from here, like upload auctions, check closed auctions, search results etc. We are hoping to publish our own stand alone application to allow for the uploading of auctions soon.

    We will be starting to offer our Happy Hour auctions to eBid US in the next few days. So our US users should keep an eye on the frontpage of the site.

    Our new Bulk Upload system has been a success allowing the management of bulk uploads to be carried out by the individual user and not us as it was before. This has helped auction numbers to rise to over 540000 again after we dived a bit earlier this year when alot of deadwood auctions were cleared out.

    We are also looking at ways of handling other file formats apart fromt eh eBid spreadsheet format. This will allow users of other auction and e-commerce sites to upload their data files of auctions into eBid without restructuring them. The main problem we have with this is matching categories. eBid currently has 6500 categories and for each of these 6500 we must match our code with an equivalent code of the other site to enable products to be uploaded to the correct category. We might need a bit of help doing this from some trusted eBidders out there.

    Gonna head off now and work on our translation system. Its been semi-ready for about 6 months but other things have taken precedence. Translation is an ongoing task and we want to have the right people helping us before we start to make sure we don't run into any problems at a later date, site changes are regular and a capable support structure for each language is a must before we take this large step.


    Have a great Xmas.
    Gazza
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  8. #18
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Its been a while since I posted here. Thought I'd just check in quickly with an update. I will add a longer post in the next couple of days. I have to pull myself off my seat and go to my friends wedding in about half an hour. It'll be strange to see daylight again!

    Our official auction count is now at 1,375,057 compared to 1,360,427 of another site. Congratulations and thanks to everyone for lifting us to this level.

    We have doubled our daily ad spend with Google over the past week and plan to continue at this level so keep your eyes peeled for our text and banner ads in UK, US, Canada, Ireland and Australia.

    Also we will be testing the water with our first radio ads and some billboard advertising in the UK in the next couple of months also.

    We have also just signed an ongoing contract with a US PR agecncy to help boost growth in the States.

    Once again, mine and Mark's heartfelt thanks goes to everyone who has stuck by us so far.

    Gazza
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  9. #19
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Hi Everyone,

    This is Gazza checking in to let you know what's been happening at eBid over the last couple of months or so..

    Well, it's been a hectic time to say the least. We've been keeping pace with our rapid growth, tweeking, updating, ripping up and starting again, you name it we've done it over the last couple of months. As we have grown over the years we have made more and more additions to the site's software and there comes a time where you can't bolt anything else on and have to bite the bullet and roll things back to basics and rebuild from the bottom up. That is what we've been doing over the last 3 months and is the reason you won't have seen too many new additions to the site in that time.

    I'm glad to say we're done now and are currently testing everything, although you won't see any drastic cosmetic changes when we launch the updated site, we will be much more scalable and capable of future growth and large influxes of new users won't cause the outages that soem of you may have experienced over the last couple of months.

    As some of you will know we have a long list of objectives that we try to keep up with and that list has been growing whilst we worked on the new software but don't worry we are already back on the case and are currently working on :

    1) Most importantly we have commenced work on a complete new redesign. Our intention is to become one of the top shopping destinations in the world and this requires a layout that is as close to perfection as possible.

    2) Offline listing software. We've been let down very badly just recently with the programmer of our Ninja Lister software and instead of battling on we have decided to cut our losses and have started from scratch again. We have decided to include an import facility into this now to allow data files from other online sales sites to be imported into eBid.

    3) API. This was nearing its completion until we had to divert everything over to the rebuild of the core eBid software. Now we are back on course we can expect the initial versions of this early in the new year.

    4) Printable invoices / packing slips. A simple but needed addition will be one of the first in the coming weeks.

    5) My Gallery folders. We will be adding a folder hierarchy to My Gallery to allow you to store your photos more conveniently.

    6) Shipping discounts for multiple items. Although discounts can be added to invoices we will be adding automatic calculation of multiple items to enable users to checkout immediately without having to wait for an invoice.

    7) UPS and Fedex additions to the US shipping calculator.

    Whilst we have been burning the midnight oil we haven't been idle with our increase in advertising. Our online activities are growing month on month, our online spend has gone up by 400% in the last 3 months alone and we are also starting to feel the benefits from some of our first forays into offline advertising. In fact I've attached some examples of this to this post, billboards and radio sponsorship.

    Gotta dash now, more testing to do.

    Myself and Mark would again like to thank everyone who has supported eBid from day one up until now. Without you we would be just another dot com casualty.

    Gazza

    ps. If you didn't know, we are offering a cash prize of $2500 or local equivalent to the seller who lists the auction that takes us onto the 2 million mark. As of now our count is 1,931,854 auctions. Good luck to everyone. We will let you know the winner the second we hit the 2m mark.
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    Last edited by gazza; 28th December 2008 at 10:14 AM.
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