Bangle Bangle Blog

Where ever possible we have tried to promote www.banglebangle.co.uk via free online marketplaces. The following post outlines the ones we are using so far. If you know of any others that we should be using please feel free to drop us a line.

http://www.sellmefree.co.nz/

This site is based in New Zealand but you can list up to 24 items free of charge. As they say in the promotional material:

• FREE to join.
• FREE to list an item.
• FREE to add photos – as many as 20 if you want to!
• FREE to add a movie – try it, it’s brilliant.
• FREE to add your logo.
• FREE to include a link to your website.
• FREE to add a Skype or MSN address.
• FREE to get help from our Call Centre.

The downside is the site is in New Zealand so postage is a little bit more than posting domestically in the UK. The other major downside is the New Zealand market is completely dominated by www.trademe.co.nz. Sellmefree sas generated little or no traffic except one very obvious attempt to get me to send my bank details to Nigeria.

http://banglebangle.bttradespace.com/

This site is very buggy and looks like it was rushed to the market. They are free to use and they support Paypal transactions though so that is a good thing. Not much in the way of traffic from them in the first month but the bangle ads don’t expire so I hope things pick up for them and therefore me.
Another downside is that you can only list five items before they start charging.

http://www.facebook.com/marketplace/

Great interface, easy to use, free to upload, the ads don’t expire and millions of potential customers. What else could you ask for? Should be a great source of traffic in the long run. And if/when it is I expect they will start charging.

http://www.Loot.com

A very popular free ad paper in the UK. Their website also offers free ads with free image uploads as long as you don’t want any bells and whistles.
The downside is the free adds are deleted after 7 days so you have to keep reposting.
Also the site doesn’t work properly unless you are using IE6. Disappointing.

http://uk.freeads.net/

Freeads looks like the name makes it sound. Cheap and loaded with dodgy offers for gaming sites.
Easy to register and easy to upload though so we will have to wait to see if any traffic comes from it.

http://base.google.co.uk/

The good news is that there is no limit to the number of products you can put up and there is a free tool that lets you upload a spreadsheet with all of your products once a month which is excellent.
The bad news is that even though it is a Google product it is quite buggy and it doesn’t generate much of traffic. I hope that this situation will improve.

http://www.gumtree.com/

Gumtree is a hugely successful bulletin board site that was started in London in 2000 to serve the antipodean community. Since then it has expanded to 60 other cities in 6 countries and gets over a million visitors each month. Ebay have bought it and Gumtree is now part of the wider Kijiji family of bulletin board sites.

The downside is you have to keep posting your ad every few days and the interface is easy to use but labour intensive. So posting more than one bangle at a time can be time consuming.

http://www.kijiji.com/

A global network of free ad bulletin boards owned by Ebay. Great for finding the market leader in different countries and selling bangles.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

Today I received this rather transparent attempt to get my bank details and clean me out.

Hello Carl Hubbers,
Thanks for your quick responding, I really want to buy it for my sweetheart who was sent to west africa to study more of his education he told me but it for him that is why i want to buy it from you, so calculate the total cost from your area to Nigeria via DHL courier to the shshipping address below :
Name : WALEX SALAMI
Address : SHOP 9 OBOKUN MARKET OBOKUN
BUS-STOP,ELEYELE
City : IBADAN
Sate : Oyo state
Zipcode : 23402
Country : Nigeria
Phone Number :+2348068052213
& get back to me with you bank details such as :
Bank Name :
Bank Address :
Account Holder :
Account Number :
& the total cost to Nigeria

I have contacted sellforfree with the email of the scammer, ses.0007@hotmail.com. This may not be a bad email address though. The last time I posted a list of scammers on my blog it turned out that one of the address had been stolen and used by scammers. Months later after wrestling control of his online identity back from the scammers the guy Googled himself and found that I had posted his name on a list of dodgy scammers who shouldn’t be trusted.

And why can’t scammers spspell?

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

Following on from the success of the Flickr group we started another web 2.0 group on the hugely popular social networking site Facebook. We called the group “Bangle Lovers” again and it can be found on http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7289591310. Unlike Flickr, where we only had a limited number of contacts, on Facebook we have hundreds of friends all over the globe who are linked into our profiles. Once we started the Bangle Lovers group we invited all the people we knew and asked them to invite all the people they knew.

This means that we are able to contact to all of the people who have joined the group and tell them about special offers and promotions that we are having on www.banglebangle.co.uk.

Another huge advantage of Facebook is that it has a free marketplace at http://www.facebook.com/marketplace/. Unfortunately you can’t link directly to your own marketplace section yet but if you do a search for bangle you will find our bangles in the first page of the results. Part of the reason we are on the first page is because there aren’t many sellers and part of the reason there aren’t many sellers is because there probably aren’t many buyers – yet. As the marketplace grows we hope to get more traffic from Facebook.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

We have started a bangle group on Flickr, a very popular web 2.0 site for hosting photos. Flickr groups allow people with similar hobbies to get together and share photos. Our group is called Bangle Lovers and can be found at http://www.flickr.com/groups/banglelovers/. It allows us to share our bangle photographs with other people who love bangles. The other group members in turn submit their favourite bangle photographs which give us ideas for what cool bangles are out there and how to take great photos on them. This is not only a great way to promote our bangle business to people who are self confessed bangle lovers but it also gives us a forum to discuss general bangle trends and styles with people who have an interest in the subject.

The main limitation of Flickr is that we only have a few friends that we are connected to on Flickr and not all of them would be interested in bangles. What Flickr does allow though is wholesale searching of other people’s public photos to find any photographs tagged with the words “bangle lovers”. A quick search revealed quite a few complete strangers who were as in to bangle as we were and we used Flickr’s in built functionality to invite them to the Bangle Lovers group.

The other great advantage of Flickr is that we can use it to host our bangle photographs and reduce our bandwidth costs. The following photo is hosted on Flickr:

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

I have just found out that the word “bangle” is not in the Nokia predictive text dictionary. Unbelievable.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

As a new e-commerce site one of the most important things we can do is generate free traffic. Web traffic is the lifeblood of any internet site and free traffic is essential for start-ups with limited budgets.

In the next few blog entries I plan to showcase some of the ideas we have had to promote www.banglebangle.co.uk online for little or no cost.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

The whole selling bangles online is a bit hit and miss with some days being more successful than others. Today was definitely a hit day as five bangles rushed out the door in a single day. I know Amazon probably isn’t that worried but for us this is another great step on the way to creating a successful online bangle business.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

Today we hit another milestone. We sold our first multiple bangle order! My goal of creating a global bangle empire is progressing nicely.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

We sent some samples of our bangles to Rachel’s photographer friend Dario in Sydney. Today he came through with some awesome photos which we have immediately put on the site.

if you ever need any jewellery photos takes contact Dario at Igloo Studio, 18-20 Victoria St, Erskineville, NSW, Australia.

The photo is a fine example of the final images once compressed for www.banglebangle.co.uk

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

This is big because it means random people are finding us on the web and like our bangles! This is fantastic news and gives us great confidence that we’re onto a winner.