New Ownership Brings Marketing Focus To Bonanza Marketplace
There's big news at Bonanza with new ownership bringing exciting plans to ramp up business by focusing on social media and marketing.
Founder and CEO Bill Harding will step back as new owner Quincy Faison takes the helm, according to the announcement posted on the company's blog.
Effective March 9, 2023 Alloy and Bonanza Chief Executive Officer Bill Harding has sold Bonanza.com to Quincy Faison under the newly established company, Bonanza Worldwide, LLC. Quincy will have complete responsibility for the Bonanza business including product and seller strategy, development priorities, and support.
As you know, in recent years Bill has gradually stepped back from day-to-day operations at Bonanza, as he works to build the tools that can help medium-sized operations like Bonanza maximize their productive output. Bill will transition his full attention to his company's exciting new projects, Amplenote (tasks and note taking) and GitClear (developer metrics, git analytics).
This transition in Bonanza Leadership is happening at a great time for Bonanza and its sellers. But you likely wonder what that means for you, a Bonanza seller and community member.
According to Quincy, "Our plans for Bonanza is to continue to develop world class features for our sellers, but we are going to shift our company to be more marketing focused. We are going to drive more traffic. We are going to embrace social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. We are going to help our sellers produce more videos to get more eye balls.
We are going to give our sellers more tools to help them run their business on and off platform. We are creating a DSP to allow our sellers to invest in pen point marketing activities to reach their potential buyers at an affordable rate. And finally, we are creating a lending marketplace that allows our sellers to borrow working capital to invest in revenue generating activities that structure the payback strictly based on revenue generated that month.
Sellers love Bonanza and we are going to continue to be the company that Bill started 14 years ago with his vision and mission."
Prior to purchasing Bonanza, Quincy began his career with IBM 20+ years ago and focused on Small and Midsized businesses. He launched his first business at the age of 25 reselling SAP Business One to Companies with less than $10M in sales. Eventually, he built his own Cloud Based ERP focused on helping e-commerce companies manage their business end-to-end, supporting everything from financials to purchasing to inventory optimization to warehouse management to manufacturing to selling online via their own websites and a multitude of online marketplaces.
For Quincy, Bonanza had that same DNA. Bonanza is focused on helping smaller to midsized merchants. Bonanza is customer centric and isn't afraid to go up against the big boys. The staff genuinely loves their sellers and the consumers that purchase from them.
Wow, that's a very ambitious roadmap!
Most sellers I've spoken to about Bonanza say they love how easy it is to use and prefer many parts of the selling experience there vs eBay, Etsy and other marketplaces - but unfortunately there just isn't enough traffic to drive significant sales.
If Quincy can keep the positive aspects of the user experience while focusing on social media and marketing to bring in more traffic, there's a real opportunity to take market share from other platforms - especially if Bonanza continues to leverage their cross-listing capability from other sites and fee-free referral link program.
Free (no fee) sales will include sales made to buyers whose last arrival to Bonanza came via your booth referral link. Whether the buyer arrived from your own email campaigns, Customer Marketing Campaigns, or elsewhere on the web, you'll pay Bonanza nothing when you drive customers to your booth.
At eBay Open 2021, then VP Stores Tom Pinckney announced a "reduced-fee" social sharing incentive would be "coming soon" for stores - promising sellers would have Final Value Fees reduced to "only" 2.5% for sales brought in from sharing their items across social media.
Liz Morton ~ Founder
Unfortunately, eBay never followed through on that promise, Tom has since left the company, and a year and a half later it appears the whole topic has been quietly shelved with no explanation or updates.
If I were in Quincy's shoes, one of the first things I would do is create an eBay-seller specific marketing campaign to show how easy it is to import your listings from eBay to Bonanza and heavily promote that fee-free referral program. 😉
Congratulations and good luck to the whole Bonanza crew! I can't wait to see what this new chapter for the business brings to the table.
What suggestions and advice do you have for Bonanza's new owner? Let us know in the comments below!
