I have been working lots of hours on updates to make the site look much nicer. I had a cool idea one night that I would add a random logo to each page of the site, mostly for fun, so I did it. I really like the way it came out. I had to get my talented wife to make them for me first, of course. So far she made 35 logos for the site, but I will get her to make more eventually.
I have decided that with so many sellers getting mad at ebay because of yet another fee increase, that my chosen keywords for the site would be "alternative to ebay". Because thousands of people are probably Googling "ebay alternatives" right now, so I wanted to come up in the top, (unfortunately not yet). I have put in thousands of hours on this site and I want it to succeed more than anything. My wife has been supportive of me taking this gamble and I would love to repay her with a successful site that actually makes money. So far that is not the case :-( because of advertising and hosting costs, etc...
I have not heard any big complaints from anyone using the site so far (knock on wood), just a couple bugs that were fixed right away. Customer service is a huge deal to me because people want to get help when they want it, not 3-4 days from now when someone finally answers emails. We check emails 24/7 here and will answer just as soon as we get your question. The longest we took to answer an email so far has been 3 hours. I will always keep focus on that no matter how busy we get.
The price will always be 15 cents per listing as far as I can tell. My mind is boggled by the amount of money ebay is stealing from its customers every minute of the day. And they actually have the nerve to raise fees on a regular basis. I can not imagine what they are spending all that money on??? Must be some real deep pockets there. Just the profit they make in 1 day would pay for elfingo.com to run 15 years. We certainly don't think we are comparable to ebay, but we do understand what it takes to run an auction site. The cost is no more for them than it is for us. They have simply made it more by hiring office buildings full of people and oh yeah, building those fancy offices cost a ton too I bet. Now that the profit for the seller is getting too small, sellers are leaving fast and looking for an online auction alternative. It is time for ebay's monopoly to end.
Enter elfingo.com .........
Who knows what the future holds ...........
more updates to come .........
Monday, February 11, 2008
auction alternative to ebay
Monday, January 28, 2008
someone started a thread about us in a forum
I happened upon a forum tonight that was about this site. I am in shock that somone liked the site enough to talk about it. I love it... I had to join and make a comment. See it at: http://www.italkcash.com/forum/general-discussion/465-elfingo-com-ll-new-ebay-competitors.html
Thursday, January 17, 2008
site update
Thank you very much to all of you who support the site by listing and bidding on items listed. I have been working so hard on getting the site a high ranking in google so we can get more traffic. SEO (search engine optimization) is very time consuming and more complicated than I thought. I changed a couple things and the next day the site disappeared off the listings completely. I changed more stuff and I got a better ranking, so it's kind of a trial and error thing.
The referral contest was a sucess and user Missdee won the $20 cash prize. Keep a lookout on the homepage for a new contest soon. If anyone has any ideas for a fun contest let me know at cs@elfingo.com
I added a couple new features recently to the auction site. Now you can log into your seller service page and choose if you want to get listing related emails from us or not. It is under the update contact information link. I also added a person to person email contact system so members can email each other thru the site without anyone getting your email address. Emails are no longer displayed on the listing when you are logged in.
I am always working on improvements for the site and open to any ideas you have about making this auction better than any other auction site on the net. Send your ideas to cs@elfingo.com and include your userid and I will thank you with a sellers credit to use for listing totally free.
Thank you,
Bryan G.
www.elfingo.com