We look at news and happenings at some eBay alternative auction sites and marketplaces in today's eBay Alternatives roundup column.
AtomicMall has integrated with Google Base. The GB Transmitter allows sellers to send product feeds to Google Shopping and Product Search through Google's Base tool in order to increase traffic. AtomicMall's GB Transmitter also allows sellers to track inbound traffic data and analyze their feed quality for optimum performance and visibility. A tutorial is available on the site. (AtomicMall is experiencing some technical issues today as it moves to a cloud-computing system.)
Bonanzle wrote a blog post to answer member concerns about what will happen when the site gets big. Bonanzle's founder writes, "The most common concern I've heard from our sellers is that when Bonanzle gets huge, the high-volume power sellers will move in and make it more difficult to find items from smaller sellers," and proceeds to address users' concerns in the blog post.
Delcampe announced it has a new interface for multiple changes and a new forum for advertising sales. Sellers may still modify all the items from their store, but they may also select the items by category or country in which the items are put on sale. Normally the feature is only available to Club+ Gold members, but will be available to all members through January 4, 2009. The auction site also has a new forum called "Advertise your sales" where sellers may advertise special offers.
eBid announced it would give a cash award of $3,000 to the seller that listed the three millionth individual item on its site. eBid said it has grown its listings on the US site by 74 percent in the past 3 months and, on December 9th, awarded seller Huddylion $2,500 for listing the two millionth item.
OnlineAuction.com (OLA) announced the winners of its OLA/YouTube video contest. The two winners were tied and agreed to share the grand prize award of $5,000. The winners were Elizabeth Metz of Kingman Arizona, aka MetzyMom, and David Korner of Medford Oregon, aka Digit5
OZtion introduced a new website for buying and selling cars. "CarBuddy is a classifieds website and offers features such as Eco & Safety data, valuation ranges, large images and directions to the car dealer. OZtion said it was removing the "Cars For Sale" category on OZtion on December 31, 2008. Car listings can be listed instead on CarBuddy.com.au, where standard ads are free through June 30, 2009.
Wigix is running a promotion for buyers to save $5 off their first Wigix purchase. They must sign up through a special landing page to receive the offer. The purchase must be for an item above $25, and the user must use the Wigix payment system. See website for details and restrictions. Wigix also said users could now tag products: "Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can help you find similar items on Wigix as well as provide an easy way for you to classify items for later recall. Click the "Tag this page" link on any product page and start tagging today."
