Bonanza is giving sellers a powerful marketing tool that will help them reach shoppers. Conventional wisdom says it’s more effective to get an existing customer to buy from you again than to acquire a new customer, and Bonanza appears to be taking that to heart.
Bonanza explained to sellers, “The Customer Marketing Tool is a new tool that puts customer data directly into your hands. No other marketplace provides sellers with detailed information about past buyers that can be used in future campaigns.”
eBay and Amazon sellers will recognize what a radical approach this is – on those sites, the customer belongs to the marketplace, and each company has strict rules about marketing to past customers.
In contrast, the new Bonanza tool provides sellers with detailed information about their past customers including: usernames, purchasing history, and messaging history.
The tool then allows sellers to create custom lists based on various criteria, such as: when a customer made a purchase, how much they spent, and what categories they made purchases from. The lists can be set to automatically update and add new customers who fit the criteria of the list.
As Bonanza notes, buyers always have the option of removing themselves from sellers’ lists.
In introducing the new tool, Bonanza said because larger marketplaces don’t provide sellers with buyer information, there is no opportunity for sellers to develop individual rapport with their customers. “Without this personal connection, your success on these marketplaces is based on price, and price alone. Once a competitor gets your product at the same or better price, you become obsolete.”
The customer Marketing Tool also provides sellers access to information about potential customers – those individuals who checked the “subscribe” box in their booth.
Bonanza is making the preview version of the tool available so that sellers can begin making lists. The full version of the Customer Marketing Tool will be launching in mid-July. It explained that once the tool is fully launched, sellers can use the lists they created to craft customized email marketing campaigns.
“This allows you to target a variety of buyers, offering coupons and other loyalty incentives – the options are endless.”
Earlier this month, we interviewed Bonanza CEO Bill Harding who said he doesn’t agree with the marketplace orthodoxy of camouflaging the existence of the seller, which is particularly true of Amazon. “If the seller is invisible to their buyer, then the seller will be forever dependent on Amazon’s buy box to make their sales,” he said. “We want to help create sustainable, repeating customers for a business.”
