Bonanza will soon begin allowing all sellers to accept payments through Stripe, the company announced this week. Sellers can already offer payments on Bonanza through PayPal.
This week’s news comes a year after the online marketplace integrated with Stripe, though it was available only to sellers with Gold membership or higher.
There are no additional fees for using Stripe, which charges an initial fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Bonanza noted that sellers may be able to negotiate volume rates over time.
Bonanza is bucking a trend as eBay and Etsy take over managing payment processing themselves.
In a blog post announcing the new payments news to sellers, founder and CEO Bill Harding said, “Our strategy has always been about giving sellers choice. Originally, we just gave sellers the choice to diversify, so they needn’t rely on eBay alone. Later, we built stuff like the Broadcaster. It lets sellers have a choice over what channels their products list on, even what fees they pay! So the change to open Stripe really makes perfect sense for us strategically. Introducing a free and optional choice that lets sellers directly accept payments is the epitome of what we hope Bonanza represents to its sellers.”
Bonanza said it initially launched Stripe to paying members only in order to ensure Stripe’s technology worked seamlessly with Bonanza’s technology and to minimize the number of sellers affected by potential bugs or kinks. “Additionally, Bonanza absorbs the integration costs of each seller, so we wanted to be sure that Stripe was truly an added benefit to sellers.”
Bonanza said many of its sellers are multi-channel sellers who also have eBay storefronts. It pointed out that eBay will begin requiring sellers to use its own Managed Payments platform that will include a per-listing transaction fee. “We wanted to reassure the Bonanza community that our fee structure will remain unchanged. Bonanza will continue to offer free listings with no additional payment processing fees.”
You can find the full announcement with more details about using Stripe on the Bonanza blog.
This is great news for Bonanza sellers.
Also, any artisan or maker who is (or considering) selling on multiple channels should look into a Stripe account (a Shopify store should probably also be in your consideration set).
We’ve advocated for independent Bonanza many times over the past few years here on ECB and elsewhere, but Bonanza seems to have chosen as their position a servile alternative/augmentation to eBay sellers (possibly hoping to be picked up as an acquisition?) often stating they’re “politely tolerated” (by eBay and others), when we’d love to see Bonanza taking a stance as a more assertive, scrappy contender, not an obsequious beta to eBay (especially considering Bonanza, in many instances, seems to have better development / engineering capabilities than bloated eBay).
That said, one of Bonanza’s key features for eBay sellers is their import tool, allowing eBay sellers to (relatively) easily replicate their eBay listings on Bonanza.
Unfortunately, Bonanza has had significant problems with syncing eBay store listings, particularly multi-variation listings (and photos). Multi-variation listings have many problems with pictures and listings (and reliably syncing/decrementing eBay item counts after Bonanza sales).
If there were *one* initiative we feel Bonanza would be well-served in pursuing with focus and rigor, it’s ensuring the Bonanza import tool from eBay stores correctly and reliably maintains parity with eBay stores, (and multi-variation listings/photos, in particular). This tool working even 98% is not good enough, it needs to work correctly, every time, maintaining parity with the synced eBay store without requiring time-consuming manual work around defeating the purpose.
On a side note, eBay also this week announced a photo background eraser in the eBay app, a tool Bonanza has long-offered in its “background burner” offering.
Well,
BEFORE this latest announcement,
I tried it out a few weeks ago…..
They didn’t tell me I was being Forced to use PayPal ’til I got all the way through the sign up process,
which I thought was Very Deceptive of PayPal.
So I got a refund of $260 (a 1 year subscription fee) to close it right after I opened it.
Now, I will attempt to sign up with the intent of using STRIPE ONLY.
Let’s see what happens :o)
Bonanza LIES :
“Thank you for emailing. Currently all sellers must offer Paypal in order to offer stripe. The seller must be a Gold member as well. Later this year Stripe will be available but not at this time. However Paypal will still be a required online payment provider too. All sellers are required to offer Paypal as well. ”
Well, guess I won’t be selling my invention there……
Bonanza doesn’t know what a “CHOICE” is…..
I’ll say. Being forced to offer PayPal is a non-starter. Stripe makes it easy to have multiple accounts at the same e-mail address, which was what I planned to do until I saw Bonanza’s stupidity. Just another bunch of idiotic hipsters that they think know better than everybody else.
To remove All Doubt :
I just received THIS email :
“All sellers must offer Paypal in order to offer stripe. The seller must be a Gold member as well. Later this year Stripe will be available but not at this time. However Paypal will still be a required online payment provider too. All sellers are required to offer Paypal as well.
The booth cannot go online without an active valid Paypal account. ”
Definately something wrong with this picture…..
Bonanza….crickets.
Only off-eBay site that gets me sales is eCRATER.