[airliestar]

Hello everyone,
My name is Angela McGuinness and i am from Auction-australia.com. This is site that has been started by my Brother who is 17 years old and a few of his friends that live on the Sunshine coast in Australia. It was started as an all australian company and hopefully will give people another option rather than jsut Ebay. Well please take a look at it, and if you are please with the result pass it on to as many people as possible, we really need your help to get it up and running.
Thanks again
Angela

www.auction-australia.com

[akula]

Originally Posted by airliestar

Hello everyone,
My name is Angela McGuinness and i am from Auction-australia.com. This is site that has been started by my Brother who is 17 years old and a few of his friends that live on the Sunshine coast in Australia. It was started as an all australian company and hopefully will give people another option rather than jsut Ebay. Well please take a look at it, and if you are please with the result pass it on to as many people as possible, we really need your help to get it up and running.
Thanks again
Angela

www.auction-australia.com

Technically, looks great. Marketing wise, you are gonna have a problem because you are at a competitive disadvantage. In terms of word of mouth, you haven't given me a reason to tell my friends about you.

That said, do a case study on http://www.trademe.co.nz/

They are the NZ equivalent of Ebay. They just got bought for $700million

In other words, unless there is a reason, there is a no reason why you can't build a great business with http://www.auction-australia.com/.

[MfG]

Site looks very nice and very Australian.

Might take you a few months to get the intended traffic (by the way, how many people do you estimate will come to your site every day? 1000, 2000, 3000?)

You need to have a very good way to get the word out , like what akula mentioned (marketing plan)

I sincerely think that promoting a website requires both the traditional word of mouth + a lot of technolgy that contributes to building up your reputation.

How much time does your Brother and his friends have per day to develop the site? Put in more creative hours - always try to think , "How can I best grow the site in a given amount of time?".

[NVTimports]

Goodluck with the business but I suggest you get new domains such as AucAus.com and AucAus.com.au (both available).

[NeeJam]

i like your site and wish you great sucess, did you have to get any licenses to sell as an auction house or anything liek that?

[Outta Hand]

Its a nice site but i would say look and research as the site grows to find and fill a specific niche and capitalise that way... opportunities do present themselves but your eyes need to be open to different possibilities.

Wish you the best on this Angie and colleagues!

[gazzarethegan]

Good little idea, there, being australian i know the dominance of e-bay has definetly reached down here, and it is very much the monopoliser of the online auction market. If i can i would recomend that you give some incentives to customers to use your site over e-bay's.

Also i know that your website offers all the major credit cards ad well as paypal but what sought of buyer and seller protection/insurance options does it offer to its users. Have you taken into mind the possibility of fraud? Maybe youu offer such insurances against fraud, but i've searched your site and can't find it, maybe its there and i just haven't seen it. Could you explain how you deal with such menaces as fraud?

Good luck from another aussie

[airliestar]

Thankyou all for taking a moment to look at the site.

At this stage all listing are free with also no commission charged yet will only be for a limited time.

We are also looking into the insurance for fraud etc at this time and yes there is national marketing campaigne coming out in June.

My brother and his friends are treating this as a full time job so yes they do have alot of time to develop the site. Every day many changes are being made to best grow the site within the given time.

Thankyou for your feedback and any other suggestions that you would like to make are greatly accepted.

Thankyou once again
ANGELA MCGUINNESS

[milesh]

Call me a skeptic, but why should people use your site over eBay? the temporarily free listings is a good idea to get it off the ground, but most of your customers will know about eBay and as soon as you start charging I don't see why they shouldn't just use eBay australia. You'll get good attention while you're offering this for free of course but after that they might not bother coming back (are you even charging for free right now ? listing fees are there but it says list for free). Obviously with auction sites it's much, much more attractive it there's more people there because if youre a seller then more visitors = more people looking at your item = better sales and higher selling cost (more people bidding). If youre a buyer, lots more items means you can find some good bargains.

eBay is simple, reliable, more trusted, more established, has a whole heap more items and more traffic means you can get a better deal whether youre the buyer or seller. Sorry if I sound cynical but that's how many people are going to see it. Also, using a hyphen in the domain name can make the site harder to market.

One thing eBay is really lousy at though is fraud protection (they don't bother taking down or banning people offering scams and the like) so if you can offer a good buyer/seller protection scheme that will give one reason, other than that youre probably going to have to charge less than eBay, but of course ebay has unlimited resources and has a huge advantage competing with any other auction sites, they can easily afford to match whatever you offer although you yourself may not.

[nado]

I agree with milesh.

The site looks amateurish and offers nothing better than ebay... and is lacking in the amount of people using it.

You need to innovate, then read the Marketing Playbook and workout what marketing direction you wish to take.

cheers
nathan

[akula]

Originally Posted by nado

I agree with milesh.

The site looks amateurish and offers nothing better than ebay... and is lacking in the amount of people using it.

You need to innovate, then read the Marketing Playbook and workout what marketing direction you wish to take.

cheers
nathan

nado, I think you have an interesting point.

a lot of people start businesses on the premise of "we're the Australian E-Bay", or we're the Australian digg, or we're the Aussie version of [inserthere].com or (most recently) we're the search engines for australians".

one would think, if they're all doing it, there must be something to it, but the strategist would then interject and do a spill on the basis of competitive advantage and how it relates to innovation.

so are you saying that simple imitation, but with geography as the differentiator is not enough?