Bitcoin Forum

I'm getting very close to being finished with my new website BitBid. It is an auction website like eBay but everything is priced in BTC. Anyone can sign up to bid but you need a BitBid premium account to post auctions. A one time registration fee grants you unlimited auctions for life with no posting or closing fees. The current price of a premium account is somewhere between 24 and 25 BTC. Upon registration a random value between the two will be chosen for you to pay. The decimal amount you pay is used as an identifier to ensure your payment is credited to the correct account. This makes it easy for me to verify who has paid and when. Check it out at http://www.bitbid.net

The price for registration seems very high.  Also having a large one time fee and no further support for your business from a given customer is a pretty bad business model (if your goal is to stay operating) but is a GREAT business model if your goal is to take the money and run. 

I like the countdown to launch, nice touch.

I intend BitBid to stay around. I picked that price to be high enough to discourage people from signing up just to spam stuff. I figure if people are serious about selling things the 25btc price at the start will be small change compared to what they would pay eBay in posting and closing fees over a year. This one time fee is for the life of the site. You can post as many auctions as you want until the site goes bankrupt or bitcoin gets shut down. I am considering a launch discount for forum members as thanks for all their support of bitcoin. Everything is still fluid and could change depending on suggestions and opinions. I want BitBid to be a site people respect and use for years to come.

But setting a pricing structure like that, you guarantee the site will have very few sellers.  Why would I go to your site (with currently zero visitors) and place an auction up when I can go to ebay and post for free and have millions of people see it. 

Or better yet, I can go to Biddingpond.com (as far as I know they are the 'first mover' in the bitcoin auction space) and list for free, and have more people see the item then on your site where I have to drop 25btc?

Welcome to the economy. We wish you luck.

Say I have an online steam key that I setup on your site that I want to start at 15 BTC and it only gets up to 20 BTC..  Why pay 25 for signup when there are potential losses? Your signup fee is a little extreme and instead will shy away potential customers.

5-10 BTC is a little more appropriate...

His fee is one time. So you may only get 20 BTC for your key, but then you only have a 5 BTC loss to make up from there. Right now, I'm using BiddingPond (http://www.biddingpond.com/active_auctions.php?user_id=277). Until I have a reason to switch, I don't think I will.

There are a few things to motivate people to switch. If there were a lot more users there, of course one would be willing to switch. In order to facilitate that, you could have a promo, free for the first 200 users or something. Or the first 200 unique users to post an auction get their sign up fee refunded (maybe even just as an auction credit).

Or you could have different types of accounts, one which charges to list or takes a portion of the winnings, and then one with a signup fee. But in any case, I think you should have a promo to get people using it, because at this point nobody has incentive to switch from anything else.

That actually is a problem as well, not just the amount of the fee, but it also nearly guarantees his long term failure, even if he is successful short term.   You need an ongoing source of income to run a business.  While it is not the definition of a ponzi scheme, it is close if you only take a (large) fee upfront.  Now new customers are paying for the operating expenses of the older ones.  Once the new customers dry up, there is no money to come in and pay the bills.  The business folds along with all of those large upfront fees. 

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Got me thinking about a lot of stuff related to the business side. Right now I don't have much invested besides the time it took to build the site so I'm OK with a small periodic income as people sign up. Right now I am mainly getting the site up and running to help the bitcoin economy. Choice and competition are good so this is me throwing an alternative into the pool. I am going to post a promo code here on the forums soon that will give a big discount to the first 200 bitcoin forum members that sign up using it. I'm kind of seeing this site as an app that you buy (with your registration fee) and then can use how ever much you like. You will have complete control over how long the auction lasts and can repost it as many times as you want till it sells. I have BitBid tied in with Twitter and Facebook so all auctions will be promoted there automatically when you post something for sale. That way you have an easy way of sharing things you are selling with people in your social network by simply "Liking" or retweeting your auctions. I've designed the site to be clean and simple so even bitcoin noobs can easily post their stuff for sale and invoice buyers. Thanks again for the critiques and keep them coming. I want BitBid to do well and you guys are currently the only bitcoin focus group there is. :-P

Why don't you make a new address for each account? don't re-invent the wheel with this random payment scheme

I'm going to do this now. For some reason I was thinking there was a limited number of addresses I could use.

Well they are limited, there is what, only about a few Trillion of them? So don't go using them all up too soon.

Haha, I'll try not to. For some reason I was thinking you could only generate 100 addresses but I can't even remember where I read that. Maybe I dreamed it. Anyways, new addresses it is!

BiddingPond is terribly buggy and ugly, so if this has clean, original code, I might post auctions there instead.

Here is a screen of the main auction page. I only have one test auction up right now but you can get an idea of how the layout works.
http://iansouter.com/farkstuff/bitbid_beta_screen.jpg (http://iansouter.com/farkstuff/bitbid_beta_screen.jpg)

Actually, there are 2^160 possible addresses. Generate all flippin' day!

There are 100 pre-generated addresses in the keypool by default. This is probably what you were reading about.

Good luck with your business. It's great to see the economy growing :-)

Well, it looks a hell lot better than biddingpond and that's great.
But I think the fee is a bit too high for it to feel truly attractive.

Anyway good luck and welcome!

If you like the buffet model you can probably make it work eventually, but you've got to realize that in the beginning people are doing you a favor by posting their stuff on your site. Later once those early auctions (which end up selling low because you don't have much traffic yet) are drawing buying eyeballs then you have something sellers will be willing to pay for, captured eyeballs.

You are on the right track with the discounted registrations, but you are still trying to get people to pay to whitewash your fence. Heh, maybe a bad analogy since that worked well for Tom.

If it's really about spam one thing would be a small deposit, like 2BTC. Say "Deposit is forfeit if you post really crappy stuff", but nicer.

After thinking it over I think I'm going to go for a small yearly subscription fee instead of the big flat fee up front. Unfortunately I am going to have to postpone the launch of the site as my aunt died from cancer earlier today :-( and I have to go to St. Louis for her funeral and won't have regular access to a computer or the internet. I was going to launch on 4/20 but now I think I'll move it back to next Monday.

Just to give you an idea I once researched the model of ebay.  This is how I see it.  Some may see the fees of ebay are high, but they actually like the high fees because it eliminates all the junk you see on other sites.  You don't see the $0.01 for a piece of trash auctions.  Whenever a legitimate competitor comes around they buy them out.  As long as the fees are not 1/3 higher than shipping fees there is no way anyone would use another site due the quality, insurance, feedback, and paypal they have to back up the auctions.

1/4, 1/2, or even 1 BTC to do an auction, is not a bad price if you act as insurance and arbitrator. If I was going to sart I would do a 1/2 BTC fee, 7 day auction, and if the item didn't sell I would take the fee.  But offer insurance and arbitration.

Actually there are a ton of trash auctions on Ebay.  There are many with super high shipping (though that may end soon with the new policy changes) and others with very high start prices. 

What we have always had with ebay competitors is a lack of traffic.  I list many items on ebay each week and sell a few items a week.  I have listed some similar items on non ebay sites (not just BTC denominated sites) and they have not sold.  So far biddingpond.com has the best model for the current BTC denominated auction traffic which is to let everything list at little or no cost.

Over time people will wake up and discover that it is better to use BTC on auctions, especially lower cost items (but not ruling out higher cost).  If you want to sell a 3 BTC item and go with ebay and paypal you will give them 1/3 of your money!  BTC beats everything else out there for micro-payment auctions. 

You might offer same day shipping.  Meaning the winner pays the same day, the shipper ships the same day.  Also you might require only free shipping in usa (fees included in price).  That way you don't do all the tricks as on ebay.

I know I would never do a yearly or annual plan.  I would prefer to pay 1 btc per auction.  Over 15 btc per year.  Maybe I will start my own auction site.  your domain name is awesome.