Auctionit – How we approached the problems of new marketplaces not making sales.

Auctionit was founded by sellers, people who had got tired of a specific marketplace and tried another. We encountered so many issues depending on the sites.

• High fees
• Unstable sites
• Slow load times
• Slow sales
• Poor policy

Amongst the worst of it. The first thing we did was work out our common sense policy and decided who we wanted to be. With that in mind we ten moved on and considered what we were paying in fees to the sites 1% with a minimum of 1p seemed fair), we then moved directly on to stability, we made sure our base site with minimal features was stable, and made sure we tuned the site to ensure it was as quick as could be (you can find out how we approached all of these problems in our other blog entries).

But then there is the big one, Slow sales. This is the biggest killer of new marketplaces, people launching them just don’t seem to care (or don’t know how to approach the problem), but we intend to make sales ourselves out of this site and its important to us too. So we got onto marketing.

We did a test run of advertising in December of 2017 and yielded fantastic results.

We leveraged ads on 2 networks alone and generated 598,397 ad displays on google and 256,840 ad displays on the Bing ad network. Exposing more than three quarters of a million people to our site in the test run.

So what was the key to that performance? In short we picked 30 listings and applied a finely tuned ad creation system to allow a massive number of leads for a small amount of money, in fact most of these ads were paid for by the ads displayed on our site, meaning that it can be done for our users without raising our 1% fee.

Last week we added a multi wishlist system to the listing page so your buyers can share things they want to any compatible wishlist with ease. This helps retention and third party sales.

We are now adding Facebook to this platform of advertising and are starting to include adds for all listings that are eligible, so our users will be receiving these targeted ads as part of our shared advertising budget at no extra cost. Still feel you can get more sales? We will also be compiling guides and tutorials on how to advertise your products on social networks, PPC networks etc so if you are a start up business looking to make your way into the world of online sales, auctionit will continue to pride itself on offering you the tools ou need to get started with nest to no budget or experience.