Bonanzle launched in June 2008, and AuctionBytes touched base with Bonanzle last week to get a progress report. Founder Bill Harding was reluctant to reveal exact sales numbers for competitive reasons but said December sales "were in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, with multiple hundreds of items selling per day." Bonanzle has 18,457 total registered users and about 3580 "booths" (which are online storefronts belonging to sellers). Bonanzle reported the following traffic statistics for the month of December: 469,465 visits, 280,419 unique visitors, and 4,844,018 page views.
Harding has plans to hire more employees (he currently has one) and is open to funding - "if the economy weren't the way it is, we would probably be doing that." He says Bonanzle is growing by a factor of 2 every month, and he doesn't want to undervalue the company.
The site has already broken even just 2 months after introducing optional fee-based services, and Harding expects the site to become profitable in February or March. A month or two after that, he has plans to hire additional staff. He expects to launch an API in the next 6 months to empower third-parties to interface with the site, which will improve the user experience.
Harding attributes the positive response from users to features that tap into community, such as the Hand Picked Lists. The site has a built-in chat feature so anyone who visits a seller's booth can strike up live-chat conversation, assuming the seller is online. The company encourages sellers to offer multi-item offers, coupons, shipping offers and discounts, and buyers and sellers can engage in negotiations using the chat feature. Sellers can also participate in a "Bonanza" once a month where they can put some or all of the items in their Booth on sale for up to 3 hours. Bonanzas are featured on the Buy page and Bonanzle home page to drive traffic during the sales.
How big of a factor is Google Base? Harding believes it drives 30 - 50 percent of traffic to Bonanzle. It brings the buyers, he said.
