BiggerBids Blog

Although nobody commented on the post from yesterday about the new image gallery options, quite a few people sure were vocal through email support.  And the opinions were all over the board.  So we decided to just put you in complete control over your image galleries.  Here’s how it works:

1. All existing auctions will be displayed using the “BiggerBids Classic” image gallery style.
2. All newly created auctions will be displayed using the “Classic Clean” image gallery style (unless you edit that – see below).
3. You can change the image gallery style you want displayed at the same time you assign a template to your auction.
4. You can assign your preferred image gallery style in your Auction Layouts -> Template Settings section.  Then that preferred style will automatically be assigned to all newly created auctions with that selling profile.
5. And finally, if you don’t want to give your customers the choice of bouncing into different image gallery views, there’s a new setting available for turning it off in your My Account -> Account Settings section.

Phew!  That’s enough about image galleries for a while.  Although, we’re happy to hear opinions on new designs we could add.

If you look back at any of your live auctions and click an image to see it larger it opens a new window with your gallery of images displayed.  We’ve received several requests to update the gallery design.  So we’ve taken done that, but taken it a step further.  As you’ll see, it still looks pretty much the same, but now there’s an option at the top to allow your customers to choose the view they like best.  Now we’re stepping back and asking for your feedback.  We’ll be adding more gallery options soon, but we’re curious on your thoughts about:

1. Which image gallery theme do you like the most of the current 3 available?
2. Do you like giving your customers the choice to choose how they want to see it?
3. Would you want to change image gallery themes on a per-auction basis… or maybe a per-selling profile basis?
4. What else do you like/dislike about this?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

There’s a fairly large population of our users that use our custom template storage abilities. And once we released the flexible template solution, you yelled at us for not giving you those options for your custom templates. So here you go! A couple words of caution however:

1. Flex templates are in a very early stage of development.  Although we have no intentions of taking any of the flex abilities away, we will be adding more in the future.
2. The variable documentation is non-existent for flexing.  The reason for this is due to the early state as mentioned above.  In order to figure out how to properly use flex variables (and discover their names), you’ll need to download one of the existing flex templates and scan the code.  It’s not too tough.  If you’ve mastered custom templates (and are therefore an HTML/CSS wiz too) you should be able to pick it up quickly.

And as a side note (that nobody bothered to complain to us about): we fixed the templates that weren’t downloading properly.

Have fun flexing!

I’m curious if any of our users sell on Bonanzle. The reason I ask is because they just opened up their API so that third-party sites can automatically launch items for sale on their site. There are many reasons why BiggerBids does not currently launch auctions to eBay (although we are considering it for a future upgrade), but this is a different story altogether. So tell me – do you sell on Bonanzle? How is it going for you?

OK, so there’s good news and bad news. First the bad news – there’s no new templates today. Why? Well, it’s not the lack of designs that are coming across my desk… it’s the quality that I haven’t been overly impressed with. Most BiggerBids templates are quite a bit more robust than most of our competitors and because of that, we have so much more to work with. I’m sorry to say the recent designs I’ve seen haven’t lived up to my expectations of quality. But every cloud has a silver lining, right? Well, I’m happy to say that we’ve teamed up with an amazing design team and have placed an order for a BUNCH of template designs with them. Beginning either in the coming week or the next after, we plan to be rolling out some great new designs. And rather than one new template a week, we’re shooting for multiples.

I’m making every effort to get BiggerBids in an even better place for every seller that uses our service. Sometimes certain tasks can take time, but rest assured I’m working diligently to get them all done. So many of you have submitted fantastic suggestions for overall system improvement and we’ve responded with multiple upgrades over the past few weeks. We don’t intend to stop (and I look forward to hearing more suggestions). I’m looking at some exciting new features that I hope to be announcing very soon.

A few weeks ago we rolled out our new Flex Templates feature and asked for feedback. Most of the time (unfortunately) feedback doesn’t come through via the comments sections in this blog. Instead, the majority comes through via support questions. But that’s okay! Anyhow, most of you seem to be looking for more configuration options. That seems fair to me, but so far we haven’t seen the beta flex template get a ton of use. It currently shows as the 14th most popular internally. I’m thinking that may be because we’ve named it a “Beta” template and that scares people away from giving it a try. So what used to be the Flex :: BETA TEMPLATE is now Flex :: Template #1. And today we’ve released Flex :: Template #2. It has all of the same flex options as #1 has, but the “wire frame” of the design is different. Simply put, that just means that things are in different spots within the template.

The reason for this second flex roll out is to try to gather some more information on how everyone is using them. Once the picture is a bit clearer, we’ll start getting some additional configuration parameters going. I’m thinking things like background colors, decorative headings and decorative, image-based title backgrounds will be included. Oh yeah, and for those who like to create your own templates (or modify existing ones) we’re working on giving you the ability to flex with your designs as well!

One request that I’ve received multiple times since beginning this blog is to allow members to organize their auctions into folders. Sounded like a good idea to me, so now you can. Rather than creating a separate page for managing auction folders (i.e. Add, Rename, Delete folders), we’ve placed those folder management capabilities within your Manage Auctions page. As always, I’m open to your thoughts on improving this feature further.

We’ve added a new template for the sale of women’s apparel.  It has a fairly dark (but classy) feel to it, so we’ve named it Women’s Apparel :: Dark.  A very large portion of the BiggerBids users sell clothing at auction.  and of that clothing, I would estimate about 90% is targeted to female buyers.  Give this template a try for your next women’s apperal auction and let me know what you think.

In other news, we’ve corrected the auction cloning feature. Now when you click to clone your auction you’ll be asked whether or not you’d like to include that auction’s images in the clone. Hope that helps!

We have rolled out a brand new feature that I’m very excited to announce – an all-new Step 2 in the auction layout creation process! Two major enhancements have been made with this upgrade:

1. Upload in bulk.  We have worked our great bulk uploading tool into Step 2.  You can now upload all of your auction’s images in one (highly optimized) upload.  With this, you can now take advantage of much faster upload speeds.
2. Unlimited images in layouts.  As you know well, we have always imposed a 12 image limit in your layouts.  That changes today.  You can now upload as many images to your layout as you like.  And if you’re using our bulk upload tool you can also drag and drop your images into their proper display positions right there in Step 2.

Once you get to Step 2 of your creation process you’ll see a link near the top that leads to the new Bulk Upload page.  We haven’t made this the default view for all accounts yet, because we’d really like to get your feedback on what you like and dislike about the new process.  So feel free to post comments below.  And for those who aren’t too big on change, we’ve left the classic method in tact with an improvement to allow unlimited uploads.

In other news…
We’ve also been listening to closely your feature requests.  This week, we also made the following minor upgrades:

1. You can now change a selling profile even after your auction has been saved.  We originally stayed away from this functionality to ensure that sellers did not actually get any data loss by accidentally switching a profile.  However, so many people have asked for this ability that we’ve decided to give in.
2. Images are now cloned along with auction details.  In the past cloning an auction only cloned the textual details created for that auction.  The images did now carry over in the clone.  However, we have had numerous requests for the images to carry over as well so we went ahead and put that in.  The funny thing is we’ve now had several people complain about the new image cloning so we’re going back to the drawing board on this one.  I’ll be announcing a more robust cloning feature soon.

Today I’m very pleased to announce some major improvements to our bulk image upload tool. In the past, images were uploaded to our servers and were then resized to your account specifications. Although that method of uploading was fine, it proved to be very time consuming for most users because they were uploading very large file sizes. Now, our bulk upload tool takes care of image quality compression and resizing prior to uploading your images. In our internal speed tests, this reduced upload speeds by as much as 900%! So what used to take ten minutes can now take less than two.

New Account Setting
Along with these enhancements, we’ve also provided you with the ability to control your own image quality compression setting. This number is stored in your Account Settings section under your My Account tab. You can store a number between 10% – 100%, with 100% being the best possible compression quality. By default, your account is setup with a compression quality of 75%. At that setting, you are greatly reducing file sizes, but maintaining a very high level of image clarity. In fact, for most images at a 75% compression quality, it is difficult for the naked human eye to detect a quality reduction.

A word about auction images…
Within Step 2 of your auction layout creation process, you can either upload your images manually or import them from your image hosting folders. For now, it is highly recommended that you first upload your images using the bulk upload tool and then import your images into your auctions. This will keep your time to create an auction as short as possible by allowing you to tap into the new enhancements of the bulk upload tool. As a side note here – we are working on a superior solution for direct image uploading in Step 2. I’m looking forward to announcing that solution soon