[webchalkboard]

Hi there,

I'd be really interested in your feedback please as I'm trying to make my website as useful as possible and web professionals are my target audience, so it needs to be good!

Basically it's a marketplace for buying and selling websites. You can see the URL in my signature.

Sellers can:
i) Advertise their website or domain for free
ii) Pay to upgrade their listing
iii) When you add a site your pagerank and alexa score are calculated automatically for you.
iv) You can upload associated documents and images to support your listing
v) You can obviously enter basic information such as date established, traffic levels and current revenue from the site.
vi) You can also enter an embargo date and end date for your auction.

Buyers can:
i) Browse the items for sale in the auctions.
ii) Ask questions about items
iii) Place bids on items
iv) Use a BIN feature to buy items outright immediately.
v) Setup email alerts for future items they might want, so they are alerted as soon as they get added to the auction.

Other features:
i) The blogsphere features blog posts from blogs selected by the members of the site and rated.

I'd be very interested in your first impressions of the site.

a) Do you find it obvious what it's about?
b) What can be improved?
c) Would you become a member, if not, why not?
d) Would you sell a website via the site? If not why not? What can be done to change your mind?

Many thanks,
Tom

[bizzar528]

a) Do you find it obvious what it's about?
Yep, buying and selling websites.

b) What can be improved?
Not a lot. Looks like a good layout, good system. I like the comment bubbles when hovering over a link.

c) Would you become a member, if not, why not?
Probably not. Low user base, limited site selection, mostly uk domains

d) Would you sell a website via the site? If not why not? What can be done to change your mind?
Probably not. See c above. Low user count ensures that I won't get best offer. Need more users, more listings, more advertising. You should pop on some popular domain/site selling forums to advertise services and listings. RSS feeds are a good way for people to keep an eye on what your site is offering. If possible, find other rss feeds for listing services (like ebay listings for sites/domains and/or other marketplaces) to increase domain/site listings.

Visit popular market place forums like forums.digitalpoint.com and marketplace.sitepoint.com to advertise services and listings. Help to improve visibility and user count.

[webchalkboard]

Thanks very much for the reply. While it's not exactly what I wanted to hear, it does give me something to work on. I have found building up a user base the hard bit. There are a number of users now, and it's growing daily, but I'm really keen to find new ways to attract more people, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario.

The RSS feed is a good idea, I'm going to work on that to increase the usefulness of the site. We have an RSS feed for webchalkboard itself, but utilising other RSS feeds to provide additional listings might be an interesting idea. The only other problem with that is that I want to ensure quality listings, rather than all the rubbish you get on ebay and some of the other marketplaces out there...

Thanks for the advice and ideas though, much appreciated.

[webchalkboard]

By the way, what made you think there was a low user count?

[bizzar528]

Because most listings show no bidders. Of the handful I tried, all said na.

I would gauge users of an auction site like yours to be based on actual bidders and not visitors.

Visitors aren't spending money, driving up auction prices. They are usually also the people who don't click on ads. They come, check things out, and never come back. If you had 5000 or 10000 visitiors, but only 2-3 users, I'd consider it an ineffective place to sell my domains/sites.

[webchalkboard]

Interesting, thanks for the clarification.