Bonanza redesigned its homepage in order to do a better job of representing the Bonanza experience, it told users. “We wanted to articulate what our marketplace has to offer buyers and sellers and present this in a way that was both contemporary and uniquely Bonanza.”
Bonanza founder Bill Harding told EcommerceBytes, “The new page is a manifestation of how much we can get done now that we have the means to build out a full fledged team of great designers and developers. I’ve spent a great deal of my time over the past year dedicated to growing our team with the right people. The increased speed at which we’re able to update and improve the site (plus answer our support inquiries) is us beginning to reap the rewards of that effort.”
The online marketplace also launched new navigation. “At first, we just wanted to make the page header feel consistent with the new homepage and allow it to scale across different screen sizes,” the company told users. “Once we got deeper into the design review, we realized we had opportunities to improve the navigation beyond the look and feel.”
Bonanza said it wanted to make shopping categories easier and took the top categories listed in the “Browse” dropdown and listed them prominently in the header, and it also exposes some of the other popular categories “that had been hidden away.”
“We think this new shopping navigation will be a big improvement both for branding and usability. It gives visitors a clearer picture of everything they can find on Bonanza and makes it quicker to scan and find the right category.”
In response to a seller who said they wished Bonanza would spend money on advertising instead, Harding said the company was on track to spend about $2 million on advertising in 2015 – “about 10x what we spent just a couple years ago.”
“As a result,” he said, “we have seen more and more of our sellers making sales over the past couple years. We fully agree with you that it’s important for us to continue to spread the Bonanza brand and make sure buyers find it. But we also know we have to always invest in making the site feel clean and modern if we want those buyers to come back.”
Another seller said the categories placed at the top of sellers’ booths were confusing. “If I was a Buyer I’d click on one of those categories thinking they were part of the Seller’s booth options. Instead it takes the Buyer out of the booth. Other than that it looks nice.”
In response, Harding wrote, “To those concerned about the categories: We’re going to be keeping a close eye on our conversion rate in the next couple days to gauge whether this does indeed pose a problem to incoming shoppers.” He said if the data shows it does, the marketplace might then make a change to show the categories only on select pages where the buyer is in more of a “browsing” mindset.
The full announcement along with user comments is available on the Bonanza blog. (You must be logged in to view the comments.)
