Online Auction Alternative by elfingo.com

auction alternative to ebay

2008-02-11T10:12:00.000-08:00

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 .........

someone started a thread about us in a forum

2008-01-28T23:48:00.000-08:00

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

site update

2008-01-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

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

Site update

2007-11-07T00:49:00.000-08:00

Ok now that i have this page set up properly...

I have been so busy helping new sign ups, advertising the site, and fixing site bugs, that i do not have time to say much right now. Things are going just like I wanted. The site is growing and people are listing and bidding. We certainly are no ebay, but everyone I have heard from so far loves the site and the customer service we provide. who knows what the future holds for us.

Elfingo.com

November 7, 2007 12:43 AM

elfingo.com update

2007-11-07T00:47:00.000-08:00

The site is doing well, but I have no idea how this blog thing works so I am posting theis message purely to see if it shows up on top of the page or not. lol

Bryan G

Elfingo.com Online Auctions

2007-09-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the elfingo.com online auction blog.

I created this auction site several years ago under the name biddingsquare.com but then had a baby to take care of. Well you know the rest of the story there. No time, no money, anyway I am bringing it back now and I plan to have a grand opening in about a month (not sure exactly when) around oct 15th after I work on the programming some more.

I have many cool features incorporated into this site that no other site had at the time, but now I have some catching up to do. Anyway this was all hand coded by me and I am no expert coder for sure so if you would like to help please email me.

My goal used to be to create an auction site that could list stuff cheaper than that other big auction guy but now I have changed my goal. I used that other online auction place recently for a computer board I had lying around and OMG it was confusing to list an item. They sure have gotten much harder to use than when they were new. AND WHATS WITH THE PURE GREED OVER THERE? They are charging 35cents to have my 100x100 pixel picture show on the search page. Please people give me a break! That picture doesnt cost them one cent to display. And thats not all, they also charge so much in final value fees that its mind boggling. One of my favorite rip offs it the $5 fee to highlight your listing. WHAT? 5 bucks to insert a little piece of code into your listing. So my new goal is to not only be cheaper (very easy) but be simple to list items. I will say its the simple fast easy to use cheap auction site. Elfingo.com what do you think?

Well anyway I hope some ASP programmer reads this and would like to look over some of my pages for me. Like I said I'm no expert coder, just a regular guy learing as I go. I'll keep working on it and keep updating the progress here. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I think the best way to be sucessful is to listen to the public and give them what they want, a fact that companies ALWAYS forget after they get big. When's the last time you were able to speak to a real person at that other place?

I always thought that I could build a sucessful online auction alternative that doesn't cost much to sell and has simple controls that noobies can figure out. Maybe we can together.

Please bookmark the site and check back in a couple weeks to see my progress.
http://www.elfingo.com/

Thanks for reading,
Bryan G.
Owner elfingo.com