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For information about us, to ask questions, please visit our knowledgebase or our support site. Bidtopia is creating an open, business friendly exchange with a low cost and simple to use platform. Our company philosophy and software is legacy free, allowing us to leap right into the newest business concepts and technologies without concern for sunken political or financial costs. Bidtopia can immediately focus and act on the needs of today's larger volume buyers and sellers. We are not constrained with the burden of re-training older and outdated user habits or adapting and integrating decade old programs and technology. Here are just a few samples of how Bidtopia addresses some of the most common concerns found on other auction platforms. MEMBERSHIP The Problem - Most auction sites focus on reporting "number of users" to swoon buyers and sellers to their market place. While a high number of users can be a good sign for a healthy market, it often leads to questionable business practices. Auction sites that report high numbers often make it far too easy for buyers or sellers to register on their site. A fake name and a free e-mail account is all one needs to register on most auction sites today, and suspension typically means nothing more than a 5 minute delay while the user creates yet another fake name and free e-mail account. Another bad practice is failing to release old user ID's, even if they have not been used in over 10 years. This is frustrating when you find the perfect ID that matches your store name, but that ID is being "squatted on" by a user who has long since left the trading platform. The greatest fear on most sites is that any malicious bidder can put a seller out of business in just a few days. Vindictive buyers can simply sign up with a bogus ID and snipe every one of a sellers auctions for a ridiculously high bid with no intention of paying. Each night the seller will have all of his or her auctions close with no real wining bidder-and worse yet, probably be accused of shill bidding. Even if the auction site suspends the user the same day, the malicious bidder simply signs up a new fake account and begins again the following day. Sellers simply have no defense from this type of attack as they watch their revenues instantly vaporize. The Solution - Bidtopia has two classes of membership, BUYERS and SELLERS, and there is an approval process for both. A fake name and free e-mail does not qualify you for a BUYER account on Bidtopia. We feel that it is important to make sure you are a viable candidate and have the ability to carry out an online transaction and payment. All Bidtopia BUYERS have to prove they have financial resources and ability to complete a transaction by paying an application fee of 99 cents as part of their registration. This also prevents users from creating fictitious names, because we cross-reference and document their credit card information, PayPal buyer ID, and/or banking information. BUYERS who are suspended from Bidtopia have all their financial documents "black listed," which allows us to prevent them from returning to the site under another name. This is only one example of the measures we take to assure the quality of BUYERS on our exchange, while preventing suspended users from returning to the site. SELLERS also have an approval process that is far more detailed. SELLERS have to fill out a form requesting membership. A Bidtopia account manager reviews each form. All SELLERS must also complete a phone interview process with a Bidtopia staff member prior to joining the exchange. SELLERS must be able to show and prove previous online auction or retail experience. An application and set up fee of $100 is charged to anyone who passes the rigorous screening process and is approved to sell on the exchange. Lastly, if a BIDDER or a SELLER do not log in for over one year, their account is forfeited, and the user id will once again become available. GROWING YOUR BUSINESS The Problem - Most online marketplaces want you to succeed, as long as you only do it within their marketplace. Linking your customers from their platform to your website is usually strictly forbidden. Live chat links are typically disallowed, reference to other web sites are removed, JAVA is banned from your listings, graphical images for cross promotion are disallowed, and any link that removes the user from the website is forbidden. Most online auctions or marketplaces will not even allow your customer service department to use instant messaging, even though they often use it themselves! The Solution - Bidtopia realizes that our job is to help sellers grow, and we will not sacrifice your success to further our own. We allow links to other websites, your private store, and even links to auctions that you are hosting on competing sites. Java is allowed in our listings, as are graphics, links, and live chats. Bidtopia supports an open platform that allows you to run your business with fewer constraints to promote higher profits so that you can pass those savings along to your buyers. FEES The Problem - High fees seriously affect the BUYER. As sellers must raise their prices in order to pay for the increasingly common rate hikes. This causes a ripple effect. Buyers soon notice that auction sites are becoming crowded with overpriced items that have high starting bids or reserves prices. These items can often be bought cheaper through a retail store. Sellers also express dismay over the complication of calculating fees through a host of "a-la-carte" add-ons and sliding scale percentages. The Solution - Bidtopia offers a simple and affordable approach to billing. Bidtopia has one single flat rate fee for all sales conducted on the exchange, 2.75% of final value sales price. BILLING The Problem - Most online auction companies bill sellers the moment the auction ends, regardless of whether the seller ever actually collects money from the buyer. Many times buyers change their mind or simply never intended to complete the transaction. Can you imagine the outrage if Realtors demanded their 6% commission the day they walked through your house with a potential buyer? Realtors know that in a professional business world, you collect your fees at time of closing-when the buyer completes the transaction and the seller has the money in hand to pay the realtor fees. This simple, professional courtesy has been lost in the online marketplace, and worse yet, trying to get a refund is often an arduous 14 day process made worse by difficult formats, rules and procedures. The Solution - Bidtopia does not charge any sales fee until you actually-you guessed it-complete the sale. FEEDBACK The Problem - Unique feedback is a wonderful system for peer-to-peer collectors who were trading Pez dispensers 10 years ago; however, no one ever envisioned online auctions developing into the multi billion-dollar exchange that we use today. Once faced with the law of big numbers, and professional, high volume sellers, unique feedback becomes far less relevant. This is why McDonalds says "30 BILLION SERVED" and not "1 MILLION UNIQUE FIRST TIME BURGER EATERS SERVICED." Also, unique feedback fails to capture important standard business practices, such as the value of repeat customers. With most online auction sites, 1,000 positive comments from a single, long-time customer, over a seven-year span, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at your store, can be wiped out by a single, new first-time buyer who leaves you a negative feedback for a $1 pack of chewing gum. You get that one negative feedback from a malcontent and your feedback score would be 50%, and you would most likely be thrown off the online auction site. Leaving a feedback can take users up to several minutes each, and normally only the first one ever counts towards the buyer or seller's overall score. This means that buyers who purchase large orders of merchandise from the same seller are often burdened with a difficult and time consuming feedback process that, after the first time, won't really count or help the seller. This system breeds complacency, and often feedback ends up never being left by the larger buyers. Lastly, let us not forget feedback retaliation. With "tit for tat" feedback, buyers and sellers often get into a stalemate regarding who is going to leave feedback first, knowing full well the other user will respond based on the comments of the person who blinks first. This effectively destroys the credibility of the feedback, creating a false number of positives left by sellers who are too afraid to leave a negative on a buyer. After all, if a buyer gets too many negatives, he or she just opens a new account. For a seller, years of hard work and reputation cannot be so easily rebuilt. The Solution - Bidtopia has a two-tier feedback system that is different for buyers and sellers. Bidtopia believes that buyers are different than sellers, and that a "one size fits all" mentality does not best serve the needs of our customers. As a buyer, you pretty much have one important job-to pay for your item within the time limit that you agreed to. Therefore, buyers have a TRANSACTION SCORE. Every time a seller reports back to Bidtopia that a bidder has paid for an item, the Transaction Score of the buyer account will receive a +1, resulting in an increase by 1 point. This is not a unique score. Rather, you may score 2 "transaction points" if you pay for two items from the same seller. If a seller reports back to BIDTOPIA that a bidder failed to pay in the allotted checkout time, the bidder account will receive a -1, resulting in a reduction of 1 point to his or her Transaction Score. If a seller neither reports the item as paid or not paid after a 30 day time period, Bidtopia auctions will assume the transaction was successful, and the bidder account will receive a +1 Transaction Score. Any bidder account with a Transaction Score of less than 90%, with 5 or more negative transactions, will be suspended from further bidding. With this system, buyers no longer have to fear retaliation because every transaction they make, and pay for, will result in positive scoring. Should a seller falsify a "non paying bidder" notice, the buyer can simply provide Bidtopia with proof of payment, and the score will be corrected. A buyer who accidentally forgets to purchase an item and ends up with a negative point, may approach the seller and ask for a reversal. Most sellers on Bidtopia offer a modest restocking fee, in exchange changing the status of the item from an UNPAID to a PAID status, which will instantly reverse and update the feedback score. At Bidtopia, sellers still have a relatively traditional feedback system-positive, negative and neutrals, with a few major changes. The seller Bidtopia system allows for aggregate scores, meaning that we count every comment from every customer, not just the first comment. Bidtopia also erases all negative and neutral comments left by any user who is suspended from the exchange, rather than just graying them out. Lastly, just like buyers are automatically left a positive Transaction Score, if the seller forgets, after 30 days, the seller also gets a positive generic feedback comment automatically should the buyer forget, or become too busy to leave one. This unprecedented system means that every transaction results in feedback that actually counts. CHOOSING THE RIGHT PLATFORM The Problem - Many online auctions websites were started for a specific purpose, and now, 10 years later, they find themselves stuck with antiquated ideas that are too deeply embedded into their DNA to change. While one marketplace provider may have the ultimate feedback system for trading beanie babies between two consumers, it often falls apart when it used by large sellers facing the law of big numbers. Many marketplaces also pride themselves in the number of items they currently have for sale, regardless if any of those items actually sell. Online auction companies that are not careful can easily end up with huge volumes of overpriced and stagnant inventory or vast quantities of low-end, dollar store, product. The Solution - Bidtopia is not all things to all people. Our marketplace caters to those who are committed to selling large volumes of merchandise at a fair market value. If you are looking to clear the junk out of your attic and turn it into cash, we are not a great fit. Likewise, if you are content with selling a handful of products off of a store format with thousands of listings, then Bidtopia is not for you. We are VERY serious about creating an active and vibrant platform, where any auction has the chance of being won at 99 cents, and where the buyer, not the seller, sets the ultimate sales price of the merchandise. Sellers are never charged a listing or store carrying fee as long as their product actually sells. Items that fail to get bids, or sit in the store for over 30 days without a sale, create an FTS fee (Failure to Sell). This prevents sellers from loading the site up with low value junk or overpriced merchandise, and thus improves the buyer experience. |
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