Online marketplace Bonanza has brought in a new executive to run its marketplace. Greg Braukus comes from Terex Corporation where he was most recently Director of Enterprise eCommerce. His first day at Bonanza was January 2nd.
He spent over four years at Amazon in the mid 2000’s, and in an interview with EcommerceBytes on Friday, he talked the talk: among his priorities are to listen to customers and give them the tools they need to succeed while also driving efficiencies.
Bonanza founder Bill Harding said Braukus had certain principles drilled into him during his time at Amazon, including the focus on customers. (Who’s the customer, we asked Braukus? Sellers, he said without skipping a beat.) The two see Bonanza as a lower cost venue that offers greater growth opportunity.
One of the foundational elements on which the new Vice President wants to make progress is Bonanza’s position as a trusted, reliable, secure, and compliant marketplace, he said.
He also wants to simplify the business and go back to Bonanza’s roots by reconnecting with its community of sellers.
When it comes to marketing – specifically driving buyers to the site – Harding said they’re focused on the value proposition Bonanza brings to sellers, which he said ties back to Broadcaster. That’s the feature that allows sellers to market their listings on Google Shopping, eBay, and through affiliate marketing.
Bonanza will also be looking at the best marketing avenues in 2020, which include social media – and Braukus will bring Amazon’s discipline to bear by measuring the performance of marketing investments.
While Braukus will take on the task of running Bonanza’s marketplace, Harding will serve as nominal CEO and advisor to support Greg, but he will be principally focused on Bonanza’s other products this year: Amplenote (tasks and note taking) and GitClear (developermetrics, git analytics).
In an announcement going out to sellers, Harding said that in addition to leveraging Bonanza longstanding “secret sauce,” which is happy sellers, Braukus will renew Bonanza’s focus in the following ways:
- the best-in-class seller value proposition, with tools and features to generate profit with less process;
- a marketplace that can effectively combat fraud and ensure compliance at a time where many eCommerce sites have come under scrutiny;
- a reinvigorated, seller-based community that helps drive decision-making.
In the interview, both Harding and Braukus called out the current regulatory environment, including new sales tax requirements and the need to focus on fighting counterfeits. Harding called it unprecedented, impacting every marketplace. But he also sees it as an opportunity given Bonanza’s experience. Nevertheless, he hopes the team can spend less time this year on issues like individual state sales tax requirements and more time on marketing, he said.
Harding also said fighting fakes will always be a cat-and-mouse game – there’s no single recipe to solve the problem. Bonanza uses technology to stay ahead, including heuristics and machine learning, much of it developed in-house along with the help of some third-party tools, the CEO said.
Customer service is also an issue sellers care deeply about, and Braukus said, “we can always do better.” Three weeks into his new job, he’s looking at the best ways to provide service to sellers.
We asked Braukus if he saw Bonanza as a marketplace or a marketing channel. For instance, if he was talking to an online seller, how would he describe it? Both, he replied. Harding chimed in – that’s what makes Bonanza unique.
It will be interesting to see how Braukus makes his mark on Bonanza. The marketplace launched in 2008 when many then-dissatisfied eBay sellers were looking for an alternative venue, and he’s clearly looking to recapture the enthusiasm of Bonanza’s early days.
I was one of those that tried Bonanza way back when and the problem that I had was a complete and total lack of buyers. I had good items for sale and very good prices but there was just not enough traffic to justify continuing with the service so I just stopped listing on it. I’m not even sure if I still have my account open on that site but unless something has changed drastically traffic wise, it was just not worth the time to post the listings and make sure daily that if anything actually sold that I got it our quickly. I may check it out and see if something has changed if it is not a lot of extra work trying to list on their site. With Ebay I still use Turbo Lister which makes it very easy to keep track of my listings and allows me to cancel and relist items as i see fit in just a few minutes each month.I do use some other sites also but do not have as large of am inventory for those sites at this time.
@Silver King: Me too.
They could make Stripe available to all sellers, like they said they would years ago, and drop the ridiculous requirement to offer PayPal in order to offer Stripe. Of course, they’re just as tone deaf as eBay so they won’t.
I would like to see another site offer auctions as EB is the only site that does that.
There is eBid and Webstore that do auctions and buy it now format.
If theses sites would start gaining recognition, the auction would be good to work with.
I tried their eBay sync, but no buyers. Item condition is not handled properly in the Stamps category because the eBay condition description requires setting the condition of unused stamps as “used”. Since eBay doesn’t display Item Condition, the hack is harmless. Unfortunately, Bonanza does, leaving potential buyers confused.
I tried B. many times and every time I was disappointed. Or actually was not..
It is a useless site, although I had a few sales there.
The whole look of the site is very very out of reality, stuck in 1999.
Traffic is non-existent, at least for me.
My wife had a shop for handmade gemstone jewelry, also a few times, useless as well.
Hopefully the new VP knows what to do.
I sold on Bonanza for over 10 years when it was a good site. Then they started having all kinds of problems with the site. Kept contacting support who knew nothing and they kept saying it was at my end. I had two computer experts check out my system, talked to my ISP server and had Norton check out my computer twice and they all said it was at Bonanza’s end. I got mad at support at Bonanza so they blocked me from doing many things like answering my messages there and commenting in the chat room. The problem I was having was I couldn’t search on Bonanza but I could any place else on the internet or any other site. Then it got so it was adding the wrong shipping charges to my orders and they couldn’t even fix that. So I took my over 300 listening and left. When I started removing my listings I discovered that many of them had NEVER been put on Goggle shopping and yet I paid the 9% fee to get them listed. I moved to eCrater listed these items and many of them have sold as they have put them on Goggle shopping and I only pay about 3%. Plus the supporter at eCrater is VERY helpful and nice. I would never go back to Bonanza…..
Greg Braukus, give all sellers unlimited free listings with NO RELISTING FEES with no store subscription commitment and great final value fees and we will move 100 grand worth of inventory to Bonanza, so will millions of other eBay sellers.
There is your business plan in a nutshell.