The number of items for sale on the thirteen year old South African online marketplace bidorbuy.co.za recently surpassed the figure of one million.
“Those one million-plus listings consist of widely diverse products”, says bidorbuy CEO Jaco Jonker. “You can find practically anything on bidorbuy, from a needle to a tractor, literally speaking. For shoppers, the variety of products on offer is one of the major attractions of bidorbuy”.
bidorbuy has over thirty categories for listing products, covering high-tech electronic devices, computers, cars, furniture, antiques, toys, fashion and many more. Currently, over 730,000 items listed on the site are brand new, while about 300,000 are second-hand. Sellers choose whether to offer their wares at a fixed price or on auction. If they are selling something that as a rule needs to be inspected before a deal is concluded, for example a car or a house, sellers may opt to list in the classified format.
Currently, there are over 660,000 items offered at fixed “buy-now” prices, almost 240,000 on auction and about 150,000 classified listings.
“A portion of the million listings currently available on bidorbuy are automatically generated from our partner ecommerce sites”, says Jaco Jonker and adds: “However, the mainstay of bidorbuy are smaller businesses, self-employed persons or hobby sellers, and about 9000 of them list on the site every month. These days, the number of new listings uploaded in a 24-hour period is usually between 65,000 and 75,000.”
After books and music CDs, the categories that currently boast the biggest number of new listings are jewellery and watches, antiques and collectibles and fashion. Depending on the day of the week, as many as 4000 to 7500 new items are uploaded daily in each of these three categories. For music CDs and books, where trade feeds feature prominently, that number can be as high as 6,000 and 15,000 a day respectively.
“Sellers on bidorbuy can easily research the site to see what products are in demand and quickly adjust their selling strategy accordingly”, says Jaco Jonker. “They can visit the popular searches page to check what visitors to the site would probably like to have. They can also examine our recently bought section to see what people actually bought during the last seven days, and at what price.”
A quick look at the popular searches reveals that among the always desirable high-tech brands such as BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and Kindle are fashion items such as boots and handbags currently featuring fairly highly.
The recently bought section confirms that the demand for boots – ladies boots, to be more precise – is indeed on the rise. Out of about 110 ladies’ shoes bought on the site during the previous week, half were boots of all sorts, from ankle boots to mid-thigh boots.
Other recent best-sellers include the always popular collectibles (stamps, coins, toys, etc.), antique ornaments, watches, laptops, iPads and other tablets, eBook readers, cell phones and smartphones, small kitchen appliances and sporting gear, especially fishing related.
