jogalie wrote (View Post): › Rightnow many people are buying from biddersnsellers, wagglepop and other auction sites if you check their feedback system. If these sites can do better for just thousands of money, I am sure I will do better than that.

Feedback is not a good indication of sales on Wagglepop or some other sites. I rarely ever get feedback from buyers, not even 1% of the time anymore. (By the way, biddersnsellers has been shut down for a while. Too many challenges I guess, same story as many other sites.)

Quote: › You said there are gizzilion places online to shop then why would they shop at my site? People still shopping on wagglepop, biddernsellers,ioffer,ebid,webidz,ecrater. Then a person who is building a great site with all the plannings and spending money, keep the website for free up to an year. Having many users and more than 20 million listings what made you think that no one will shop out of 20 million listings in a year? I have plannings but I can't share them all. Because it's secret.

Most people look on Google to find products they want to buy. All they want is to find what they want at a fair price on a functional site from a seller or company they feel is safe to do business with. Solid search engine exposure is not easily bought. If your site has the 2 million dollar advertising budget, but lacks the critical element of great Google placement, Wagglepop sellers could still outsell sellers on your site even if Wagglepop stays small. But how would you get 20 million listings? That's a tough nut to crack.

Quote: › What all I wanted how many visitors I would get on my site If I invest 2 million dollars for the first 3 months... That's all I want to know. Rest I can't share because I don't want any one else to steal my ideas. Thank you!

No one can tell you how many visitors you would get for X amount of money. There are far too many variables to even venture a guess, especially not knowing the specifics of any of the ads or methods or details about the site itself.

In my opinion, the word "advertising" should be removed from your vocabulary for a while if you want sellers who know this business to take you seriously. If sellers or potential sellers hound you for advertising information or plans, your answer should probably be something along the lines of "Advertising efforts will begin in earnest AFTER the site reaches a couple million unique products for sale."

As others have stated, advertising will have minimal effect if all your other ducks are not lined up. If you truly have two million to spend, you better think long term budget. Prorate at least six months worth of operating/staff budget, with allowed growth expenses. Then figure out what you have for an ad budget.

Hire an IT person to figure out how many servers you need, and what these will cost. I guarantee you that two or three servers will not cover a million visitors a month. With your goals, I would not recommend less than 25 servers to start.

When advertising, you should be looking for CPC (cost per conversion), and not how many visitors you can get. Visitors are crap, and conversion is key. I believe our CPC is somewhere between $5-$6 per conversion, which is pretty good.

I would recommend changing your business ethics. You have a Wagglepop seller responding to your thread, and you want to dog on Wagglepop? You don't have to put others down to lift yourself up.

I would also recommend hiring someone to write for you. Having so many misspelled words and fragmented sentences will not be good for business.

If you are serious, I wish you the best.

But how would you get 20 million listings?

That's the big question. And the fact that you even throw out a number like that shows how little you know about this business.

Even eBay when they were at their best didn't have 20 million listings.

Another thing you have going against you is the fact that it's pretty obvious that English is not your first language. Many of us have been strung along by too many owners that had too little understanding of English, let alone our culture.

That isn't a total knock against "foreigners", as I'm currently selling well at a site started and run by an eastern European. But he doesn't pretend that his site is going to be the "next big thing". He just quietly makes the site work.

Right now virtually everything you have said tells me to stay away from your site as it just doesn't look like you know what you are doing at all. Until you prove differently, you will have a hard time getting decent sellers to sign up with you.

Carol

LOL, look at all of the experts chiming in. Seriously, take one look at their sites and then don't take any of their advice. Sorry about Angelsong, she spams every thread about her beloved Wagglepoop. Personally, I'm so sick of reading it, I'd never join that site.

Don't waste your time or money on an existing site. C'mon. They're all a bunch of copies of each other. If they were worth anything, they'd be something by now.

Of course 2 mill will get you a lot of advertising. Even some TV spots work. Take that Bamzu. Seen them on TV like twice, but their ads are so good they stick in the head. Obviously, you'd need to make sure you have enough to handle a lot of traffic. Don't start small and then plan to work up. If you are a hit, you'll be flooded like Bonanzle.

Attract buyers and keep them. Offer rebates or point or something to keep devoted buyers. Funny, but people really get into that.

Anyways, good luck. You're a bit late, but I guess better late than never.

jogalie wrote (View Post): › ... I think I will give a shot, just wish me good luck.

Good luck.

Good Luck

WOW, what a great thread!

If you wish to know how many visitors you will get with $2M: I am going to presume using Google Adsense as from that I can estimate figures.

You will have about 0.01 visitors for every 1000 ad shows, from this you will have a 1% sign up rate. If you are spending $2M you will receive a lot of brand exposure which should increase your click through rate, but not by a great deal; double it; the sign-ups will remain at 1%.

Most of the sign-ups will be sellers who are desperate to have their items listed anywhere and everywhere, such as most of the folks on this site!

Buyers are the hardest part, why will they come to you when they already know eBay and they don't care what the sellers are paying to sell their goods? There have been many auction sites which have tried to compete, (I have one) but, unless you are different what will make the buyers come? You have to have even more stuff than eBay and better brand recognition or they won't come. Now I must tell you your $2M will go nowhere against eBay; they spend $400M with Google alone; plus all the referral sites, plus word of mouth, plus their spending power to take people out of the market etc. etc.

I wouldn't think about TV, radio or a three, or even six, month campaign. It used to be accepted wisdom that to come in with a "bang" will work; it will if you have a great new idea or a killer app. which everyone wants, unfortunately you don't; you are re-hashing an old concept. I would suggest having a viral campaign where the money is better spent having users deliver friends to your website and paying them to do so; this will keep you under the radar for a while and allow you to build up a base which will steadily increase as you go along until you reach a 'tipping point'. Please don't ask me when this will be as I don't know!

Starting an auction site is a classic chicken and egg situation, no buyers without sellers and no sellers without buyers.

Therefore I don't think you need to think about the advertising just yet, nor a custom script to spend money on. If you want a site which works you will need to specialise in a niche market which isn't already dominated by the 800 pound gorilla which is eBay. Of course you may already have done all the research and know how you are going to attack the market, in which case I apologise, but I have also being doing some research today; check these sites in the UK market (purely because I have the stats here, now):

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/ebid.net
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/cqout.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/tazbar.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/specialistauctions.com

What can you see that they all have in common? Yes, correct, they are all trending down, some are spending money to remain almost even, but mostly the trend is down. My own opinion about this is that people are migrating to eBay; with all the bad publicity going around they are attracting buyers because the message is that it is easier to buy on eBay.

I have no advice to offer about whether you spend the $2M in the way you wish, other than that stated, but I honestly think that with the funds available there could be better ways to conduct your campaign.

I am happy to talk figures in a pm if you wish.

PS: Change the title of the thread to "$2 Million to spend", you will get a great response.

PPS: Are you Russian by any chance? If so, I like you already.

See, there are so many experts out there with killer sites. Look how successful they are and so open to sharing their money making ideas with you.

If ebay spends 400 million, why waste money there? Those that say not to waste money on TV ads just don't want to see your ads on TV.

In order to get listings, you'll need to have something unique (Alan must know something cause he seems to know what you have already). Of course, you'd need to have free listings and maybe even 100% free to those able to list over 1000 items. Or, you could offer a credit for each item listed and so on. Don't just do the whole first 5000 members as sellers will join but not list anything.

Either way, I don't think any of the new sites have spent 2 million, so not sure how there are so many experts on how to spend it.

Quote: › Those that say not to waste money on TV ads just don't want to see your ads on TV.

I agree, don't waste money on TV ads; make it work for you. $2M will not buy much national TV but if cash isn't an issue, spend well with a good agency.

See, there are so many experts out there with killer sites

Look who's talking. You just got here from eBay THIS summer and were looking for a new home for your items up til just recently. Like you know so much about how an alt site should work.

At least the rest of us have been in in the alt site trenches for about 3 years or more. Several of us have tried at least a dozen alt sites in that time and been burned by several of them.

Personally I don't have an auction site, just my own personal web site that I built myself from scratch. I know it's not the greatest site on the web, but it works for me. It gets me as much or more in sales than my eBay store ever did with no fees to eB unless the customer uses PayPal. The only promoting I do for the site is a catalog that is included in every purchase, no mater where it originates.

No, I don't make my living off my web site. But my web site IS part of what I DO make my living on -- my vegie farm. My web site has also worked well enough FOR ME that I don't care that eBay unjustly NARU'd me over a year ago. None of my sales have come from eBay in about 18 months now.

Yes Angel pushes Wagglepop in a lot of threads. Too much for many of us. But she didn't here, at least not to start with. She gave some good decent advice. She has also been around the alt site community enough to know what works for her.

That's the big thing about all the alt sites -- what works for me, may not work for you and vice versa.

But don't discount the GOOD advice that has been given in this thread just because you want a site to spend money right off the bat. That just isn't going to work to anyone's advantage except whoever the money is spent with.

Carol

knappschiles wrote (View Post): › But don't discount the GOOD advice that has been given in this thread just because you want a site to spend money right off the bat. That just isn't going to work to anyone's advantage except whoever the money is spent with. Carol

Well said, Carol. I don't think there's much on this forum that's more irritating than people going out of their way to tell others NOT to consider the input that other posters take time out of their day to contribute.

Senseless insults could be done away with as well.

LurkeyLou wrote (View Post): › Doesn't anyone find it odd that a wanna-be vendor is on a seller forum asking venue related business questions of potential customers?

Yes! I would think that the person should have been asking an advertising agency for potential traffic numbers, NOT asking people on PSU for help with that.

I also think.....that since my advice could save this person 2 million dollars if they do really have that kind of money, they can afford to send me something like $500,000. for a consulting fee.

Well, someone comes here asking for idea etc and all they seem to get are it's a bad idea, or buy an existing site.

There have been very few actual ideas and helpers. More condescending we've tried or are doing it so don't waste your time. Hey, I can tell English isn't your native language.....wow, thanks for the light at the end of the tunnel.

I don't think the OP was trying to get a bunch of people with existing sites or cheerleaders to talk them out of everything.

Everyone is so superior, so tell them to go ask an advertising agency cause heaven forbid they should get any actual help here.

I've seen more support for spammers with a total copy-cat site that looks nasty, than for this OP willing to shell out 2 million. How many sit there and ridicule the OP and try to squash their advertising? Are you the same ones that whine and cry cause your site doesn't advertise enough? How many times have I read us complaining that a site has sellers but no buyers? Buyers don't sit on their computers every day like we do. In fact, if I hadn't started selling, I would barely have been on my computer at all this summer.

Advising someone to not advertise on TV, but rather on Adwords is sad. I'm much more of a buyer than seller, and I don't waste time looking at those. I figure those pull up all of the time and aren't really the most relevant results. Even eBay buyers don't sit on their computers.

We all say we're looking for some type of alternative that we can all goto, but are you really? It seems more like you've started your own sites and lets make sure no one gets the better of you. C'mon!

No, don't consider the input from those other posters with their own agenda. You can tell which ones have their own agenda for sure!

My opinion is you take an old product and make it better-you do not copy it-you make it BETTER. Advertising is not the issue you should be concerned with at the moment.
I am looking for something better. Can you deliver me a better selling venue that I can sell on without a change for the worse everytime I turn around.
Once you overcome that hurdle you are going to have investors that will be knocking down your door to invest their hard earned money to do your advertising for you.
Until there is a better product out there you will be wasting your 2 million-but hey, its yours to lose I am assuming.

Debb