An E-commerce marketplace headquartered in Seattle has become a home for business owners who sell everything but the ordinary. Bonanza.com is an alternative to marketplaces that exist currently, particularly Amazon.
For the past eight years, Bonanza has been (like everyone and their neighbor) brewing its own war on Amazon. While Amazon touts its customer-focused platform, Bonanza has relied on being seller-focused first.
“Our approach has been to build a non-niche platform for anyone to use to sell online. We want the process to remain accessible and profitable. We want interesting humans to be able to sell interesting products.”- Emma Repp, Project Manager.
Bonanza has made it a priority to preserve the culture of availability that E-commerce initially provided. Now, E-commerce is a standardized convenience for most households. Families rely on their Amazon Prime memberships for things as benign as diapers and table salt. This convenience is amazing, but optimizing for convenience exclusively is how culture is eliminated. All those involved, both buyers and sellers, become part of the algorithm instead of humans who are cultivating the growth of a platform, humans who should be appreciated. Ideally, E-commerce will still leave room for the buyer to continue to find treasures, and sellers with treasures will still find it to be profitable to sell. Bonanza exists to differentiate.
In addition to having to prioritize convenience over culture (forgivable), Amazon blatantly hides the involvement of third party sellers. Purchases are made through the buy-box, which presents buyers with what is algorithmically the best value. (But according to Pro-Publica’s recent article, buyers aren’t actually being presented with the cheapest product.) Said buy-box is just another part of the site, with very little effort made to delineate between what actually comes from Amazon, and what comes from a seller trying to make a living on the platform. Sellers never truly own their own business.
A small group of entrepreneurs working to empower other entrepreneurs, Bonanza’s goal is not to exist on the same scale as Amazon. They are on pace, however, to double their GMV (for the third year in a row) by late 2016. Bonanza’s GMV growth has been over 4x that of Amazon’s the past two years, and the Q2 results suggest the same trend.
“Entrepreneurs using Amazon remain dependent on the vicissitudes of their policies in order to sustain their livelihood, but Amazon has little regard for the efforts of the seller. Amazon’s success is not without merit, but their unchecked growth has made this a scary time to be an E-commerce entrepreneur. We want to change that.” – Bill Harding, CEO
