UKBid Zero Fees - no really. - Auction Forum Chat

ukbid

Hi,

Over the past few days a group of us have been working on a site that I have been thinking about for a while:

http://www.ukbid.org

There are several of us working on the site and we aim to modify it quite heavily and attempt to break into the UK market (I know it's a long shot but it was always our plan to come in late and offer virtually no fees and we also managed to attain the domain we feel is going to help).

Over the course of the next few weeks we will be adding our own stuff to the site (I've added some of my own already) and continue to modify the look and feel.

We have added a forum on the back-end which we hope to integrate into the front-end soon and will be asking our users to help with feedback on what they would like to see.

Although the site isn't officially launched yet we have decided to place a few posts (like this one) onto several forums to draw interest and (hopefully) gain a few helping hands. As with every other auction site I have worked on in the past I look to community first as opposed to profit and aim to bring an honest, user-first approach to the auction scene.

I put the site up on our the server this afternoon and started adding some things to it tonight. The rest of the guys will no-doubt start adding their stuff over the next few days.

This is the main plan:

To build up a large team of administrators, modders (for the script), theme developers (for layout), marketing/PR and online promotions people with each one being a joint member of the site (splitting everything down fairly between all team members depending on role).

Initially, we will be placing any fees we recieve into an account that will (hopefully) pay for the hosting of the site but I am not honestly expecting much for a while as the main initial push will be towards building a large user base and promoting the site online/offline.

To kick start the site into life we have decided that every user who signs up will automatically recieve a free store. This will be accompanied by a subdomain pointing to their store e.g. http://mystore.ukbid.org. This will hopefully attract users to the site (along with the virtually no-fee approach - we are only charging for a few things like front-page promotion and highlighting, there are no beginning or end of auction fees at all).

Hopefully this will draw a bit of attention and will encourage you to join us.

Please check out the site at http://www.ukbid.org and the forum and tell us what you think - be nice, we aim to work really hard at this.

UPDATE:
we have changed the design of the site and at the moment we are setting up all the categories/sub-categories.

We are planning on launching properly next month (although you can sign up now).

We have decided that our only fees will be:

Highlighted Item Fee GBP 0.50
Bold Item Fee GBP 0.25
Category Featured Fee GBP 0.50
Home Page Featured Fee GBP 1.00
Media Upload Fee GBP 1.00
Store Account Types

Free Store 50 items, Price: -, flat fee
Paid Store 500 items, Price: GBP 3.00, recurring every 30 days, [ Featured Store ]

Everything else is free, so potentially you will never have to pay.

Some feedback please.

Thanks,
Andy