Wigix Company Blog

Hi Folks,

 

Wigix is beta no more!  By the time most of you read this (I'm writing this on Thursday evening) we will have launched our latest and greatest release.  As part of the release we are announcing some key marketing and PR activities that we expect will draw in a significant number of new users to our sites, particularly buyers. You'll see these both on our homepage tomorrow morning as well as via an upcoming email announcement.

 

This new release also brings about some substantial changes to our seller policies as well as our overall business model that warrant some mention here.  First off, we have decided that we want Wigix to be the most trusted marketplace on the internet, and therefore we have instituted new trust and safety requirements for all sellers.  Going forward, all sellers must verify a certain amount of financial and personal information in order to sell.   There are a number of choices offered for each of these, so we hope that most of our sellers will be able to satisfy the minimum requirement.  For those of you who are existing sellers, your current orders will still be valid and you can also place new orders with no restrictions.  However, you must meet the new trust and safety requirements within the next 30 days in order to continue selling on Wigix; if you don't then your orders will be deleted at that time.  One other thing that I also need to bring up is the fact that our new policies will end up preventing a number of non-US members to place sell orders.  I apologize to any of you that might fall in this category, but this is a trade-off that we need to make right now in order to ensure that we have the safest marketfplace with the least potential for fraud.  However, we will continue to explore all the available options for allowing more of our foreign users to sell on Wigix.

 

The other big change with this release is that we have decided to make our marketplace completely free, i.e. the promotion we've been running for the past few months will be a permanent change.  One of our hopes here is that this will help us further differentiate ourselves from other marketplaces, and we also hope this will incent our sellers to price their items even more competetively in order to attract buyers.  Now, I know that a number of you are page owners and/or CE's and are probably wondering how these change affects our revenue sharing arrangement with you since we are no longer charging transaction fees.  To make up for this we have begun to introduce 3rd-party affilate links (e.g. Amazon, Walmart) on a number of product pages, and we are aggressively expanding our use of these links to cover as much of our catalog as possible.  In nearly all cases we will make more money when buyers click on an affiliate link to make a purchase vs. if the transaction occurred on Wigix...and we will continue to share the revenue we make from those affiliate sales with our page owners and CE's.  We will also be inserting these affiliate links on pages even if those pages contain listings from Wigix sellers.  This is a change from what we have done previously.  Although some of our sellers may be taken aback by this, we feel that by always providing affiliate links this not only assists buyers with making good purchase decisions but it also provides sellers with a good "measuring stick" in terms of how to price their items...in particular, new items.  I think most everyone would agree that if an item is being sold by Amazon for less than an individual seller that it's highlyunlikely for a buyer to purchase from the latter.

 

There are numerous other changes that we've also made; among them:

 

• We've redesigned the homepage as well as most of the key landing pages in our top nav - Buy, Sell, etc.  The new pages have been designed with more help and "how to" content, making it easier for new users to understand all the features and benefits of Wigix.
• If you are inside of one of the product pages and happen to have an open sell order for that item, you can view/modify your order directly from that product page.
• For store owners we've introduced a new Storefront module within MyWigix where you can easily navigate to all your store-related functions.
• We've made a number of efficiency improvements to make our site more responsive and snappier.
• We've improved the flow and provided additional help and notifications for "bundled shipping" requests...both for buyer and seller.

 

As always, more detail on these changes can be found on our What's New page.

 

Bob

We implemented a few changes to our site yesterday, and also launched our "zero transaction fee" promotion for the next three months.  Read all about it on this thread....and Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Bob 

We launched our new Sports Cards community and trading tool today, and we also made a number of internal changes to better combat fraud.  You can find out more about these changes by visiting the What's New page or reading this discussion thread. 

 

Thanks,

Bob 

We launched the new version of the bulk (spreadsheet) upload tool yesterday.  This new version is category-specific, i.e. we provide different templates to sellers depending on the category they choose.  This should improve overall data quality as well as assist us with managing duplicates within our catalog.

 

You can find out more about these changes by visiting the What's New page or reading this discussion thread. 

 

Thanks,

Bob 

Items for sale on Wigix are now being advertised on Google Product Search.  Please visit the following thread for all the details:

 

http://www.wigix.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1783

 

Bob 

We've made a number of small enhancements to improve the handling and workflow for category and catalog page changes.  Rather than list them all here you can read about them on our What's New page, and there is also quite a bit detail posted on this discussion thread:

 

http://www.wigix.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1756

 

Thanks,

Bob

We are pleased to annouce support for Amazon Payments as an additional payment option for our sellers. Amazon Payments allows buyers and sellers the ability to transact using the payment methods (e.g. credit card, bank account) already associated with their Amazon.com account.  One additional difference between Amazon and our other payment options (PayPal, Google Checkout) is that the seller transaction fee, if applicable, will be automatically deducted at the time of the transaction.  This eliminates the need for sellers to make a separate payment to Wigix at the end of the month for those fees.

 

Please visit the What's New page to find out more about Amazon Payments and how to set it up for use on Wigx.

 

Bob 

Hi Folks,

 

Our latest release includes a revamped search function, improved picture uploading and profile picture cropping, and some nice new tools for store owners.  Please read more about these changes on our What's New page, and please visit the search discussion thread to get specifics and provide feedback on the new search features.

 

Bob 

Hi Everyone,

 

Sometime later this month we will be launching our next product release.  As many of you know, one of the major focus areas for the year is on overall site simpification, and this release will be no exception.  We are completely revamping the entire buy/sell flow process, and the end result should make things simpler, more intuitive and faster especially for sellers.  As part of this change we are also unifying the buy and sell experience for stores and non-stores, i.e. the UI experience will be nearly identical whether or not you are buying/selling from a store or non-store.  If you are currently a store owner, you will still retain all the functions you curently have, although some of them may move out of the "store" area onto other sections of MyWigix.  And if you are a seller but not a store owner you will have access to a few functions that were previously only available to store owners.  

 

There is one additional key change worth mentioning...Right now if you a store owner and logon to Wigix, when you go into MyWigix you have the ability to manage both your store inventory as well as your personal (non-store) portfolio.  One of the reasons we did this is because we felt that some store owners would want to have a clear separation between items they were selling within their stores and items within their personal porfolios.  However, this ended up generating confusion amongst some store owners, so we've decided to get rid of that separation and collapse the two together.  So, if you happen to be a store owner, all of your items, store and non-store, will be combined into one Wigix portfolio.  We think this should be acceptable to most of you, but going forward if you think you still need to keep your "personal" Wigix separate from your store then the best solution is to create a 2nd id for managing all your personal stuff.

 

I hope the above makes sense, and I look forward to your feedback after we launch these changes.

 

Bob

Hi Folks,

 

You may have noticed by now that we have completely revamped the MyWigix page.  The new page has a more clean look and is more "call to action" oriented, bringing to focus tasks and activities that need more immediate attention.  We also felt the old page was getting too crowded, as we tried to cram too much information onto one page and it started to get unwieldy.  So we've removed a lot of the excess content but still allow you to quickly access it via the provided links within each section of the page.  Some of other things we did to the page were:

 

• Allow you customize the location of most of the sections on the page
• We've made a number of changes to the "recent activity" section, and also allow you to view just your activity and/or your friends' activities
• We've revamped both the Order Management page as well as the Wigix Account Balance page
• We've consolidated all of the old account/profile settings into a new "preferences" section that should be a lot more intuitive and user-friendly

For those of you who have been submitting new pages to our catalog, one cool new feature we've introduced is the ability to automate a good portion of the submission process for the Books, Music or Movies categories.  After you select the specific category you are submitting to, you now have the option of specifying an ISBN number (for books) or UPC number (for music and movies) and we will dynamically pull in that information if we can locate it and automatically fill in as many of the product attributes as we can.  Give it a try!

 

Bob

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, Wigix has a new homepage as well as a new look.  The homepage was redesigned to make it a little easier for newcomers to find out more about the various aspects of Wigix depending on their persona - buyer, seller, content contributor, etc.  We also have a new topnav which provides direct links to some of the more commonly used functions, again depending on the user persona.  Finally...We've worked hard with many of you these past months to build out the catalog create sellable inventory, so it's now time to focus a bit more on the actual buying and selling of products and promoting Wigix as a product marketplace.   We hope you like these changes.

 

For those of you who have been with us for awhile, you know that we've always promoted the idea of Wigix also being a community where like-minded individuals can get together to discuss anything and everything about "product stuff".  To that end, I'm pleased to announce that we've launched the first two Wigix Themed Communities, Toddults and Bookworms.  Toddults is a word play on "toddler" and "adult", and is a community centered around parenting.  And as the name implies, Bookworms is a community focused on everything having to do with books.  Within each community you will find featured articles, discussions, product reviews and blogs that are specific to that community.  You'll also see a couple of brand new features: Ask the Experts, where you can ask specific questions that will be answered by experts identified within that community; and Product Battle, which pits competing products against each other and where you can vote for your preference and dialogue with other voters.  We hope you'll find our Themed Communities not only informational, but fun as well!

 

Bob 

We've made some enhancements to allow you post Facebook and Twitter notifications whenever you buy or sell items on Wigix.  To find out more of the details, please visit our What's New page.

 

Some of you may also have noticed that there have been some changes to our discussion boards.  We've just completed an upgrade to the latest version of the discussion board software we use (PHPBB), and this enables a few new functions that people have been asking for.  We're also planning a bit of a facelift to our main discussion board page, so be on the lookout for that sometime during the next week or so.

 

Bob

Hi folks, As we begin the New Year, I thought you might be interested in a few new features and improvements we just implemented: * We implemented a new public profile page, so that others within the community can view more relevant information about you and your activities within Wigix. Please note that we also made some changes related to the settings for allowing people to view your profile. Please take a look at the What's New page for more details regarding this and how to go about changing these settings. * We made several improvements to the way we deliver search results, with the most noticeable change being the ability to filter results based on "owner-specific" attributes within open orders. For example, if you are looking at search results for a bunch of t-shirts but want to further limit those results to just those being sold in size "medium", you can do that now. In order to enable this functionality our catalog team needs to spend some time identifying these key attributes across all the major categories, so if you don't see them right away in a partiuclar category then please bear with us until we complete this bit of work. * Another search enhancement we made is the ability to only search for items that have user manuals attached to them - this is done by clicking on the "only search for products with manuals" radio button underneath the main search bar. We think that people in need of finding a user manual is a great way for getting them to our site and becoming Wigix members...thanks to everyone who has been contributing to our current user manual campaign! * Sellers can now mark an item as "received" by the buyer 15 days after the item is shipped (30 days for Media Mail). An alert will be sent to the buyer when this takes place, and if he doesn't respond within 2 days the order will be marked as received and completed. I know that a number of sellers have been asking for something like this. We're also working on a way to automatically mark items as received if we are given a UPS/USPS tracking number...stay tuned for that. Hopefully you'll find these and our other new enhancements to be useful! Bob

Last night we quietly launched the ability for users to transfer dollars into/out of their Wigix accounts from their personal bank accounts via ACH.  This will come in very handy for those of you who have a need to deposit/withdraw funds from Wigix, and more importantly this removes a lot of manual processes and associated restrictions with how we were handling payments in particular.  The other major benefit is since we've made it easier to move money into/out of your Wigix account it should make the Wigix-Wigix payment mechanism more attractive to both buyers and sellers.

 

To setup your account for ACH you need to edit your profile within MyWigix and go into the "Personal" tab. Within that section you will see the ACH option for both deposits and withdrawals.  Please follow the associated instructions, and note that it will take several days to verify your account information.

 

Bob