Exploring Bonanza - The Good and The Bad.... So Far

I will be perfectly honest with you and tell you that I have accomplished very little this week! However, I have been messing around on Bonanza more, clicking links, doing some searches, and so on. While I still find their site slightly baffling to navigate if you are looking for any kind of help, I have found quite a few more things out. I'm starting to become a little more comfortable with the website itself, and there are some things I found I liked, some I didn't, and some I just don't really "get".

• They have this strange reward system called Tokens. You get these tokens by logging in, 10 each day you do AND go to the rewards page to get them, and other different ways. You can also help organize and sort items on the site, and you can get coins for creating interesting and visually pleasing lists. I also received some because I earned a "badge" on their site. You can redeem these tokens for $$ off your fees and other rewards. It will take a lot of tokens though to get any reward that's really meaningful, so I'm not really to excited about this perk(?) of theirs.
• I mentioned lists above, and I'll go into them a little more. If you've ever made a list on Etsy it's much the same way. Find items you want or are interested in and group them together by a list. You name your list, add a description and add items. They can also be a great way for an item to be featured for other buyers if your item is featured in a popular list. 
• I also found, not easily enough in my mind, a straightforward answer on their fees and such. As I mentioned in an older post there are no insertion fees, meaning you pay nothing to list your item. If/when your item sells it is a FV fee of 3.5% for a sale under $500 and $17.50 + 1.5% of the amount over $500 if the sale is greater than $500. FV stands for Final Value, and that just means the amount the item sold for, so if an item sold for $9.99 you would get charged a fee of 3.5% of that, or at least .50.There is a minimum fee of at least .50 and a maximum fee of $250. You can also pay for advertising, but I haven't delved much more into that yet, so I'll hold off talking about that just yet. Here's a link to their pricing page:    http://www.bonanza.com/site_help/general/pricing
• I also realized that if you click on the links to the left of the page, and then click on more links as you narrow down what you're looking for you can (kind of) find answers to a lot of your questions. You can ask questions, or leave a comment, underneath something the site creators have said, and it looks like they answer. Still, I find it a bit convoluted and not enough of a seller community atmosphere.
• Pricing research on Bonanza is much like Ebay, you can see what has sold through completed listings. However, if you find a shop you are wanting to analyze you cannot see what their individual sales have been that I have found yet. 

So this is what I've found so far. There is still more that I need to find out and experiment with. I kind of want to do a couple lists just to see how easy or hard it is to earn Tokens that way, and I definitely need to explore this advertising thing more as well. Over all the site is very user friendly and designed nicely I feel. I don't think a buyer would have a hard time figuring the site out, which is good. As a seller though........ I am extremely disappointed with their site. I really feel an active and dedicated forum for sellers to communicate and help one another out would do this site a world of good. Better sellers means better sales. It is a young site, relatively speaking, and I can see how they might not have any of that in place just yet, but hopefully they will. 

I believe I'll have to do a few experiments with the site to fully make up my mind, but again, I do like the site overall. I like how they seem to have blended different aspects of Ebay and Etsy and made them into one site. Being a frequent visitor of both those sites did make it easier for me to navigate around Bonanza, so hopefully other buyers will feel the same. It's still a hopeful contender for another income stream, and I'll be keeping an eye on this one even more now.