Bonanzle Growing Up: An Introduction to Item Traits

Relentless Simplicity - The Bonanzle Blog

Bonanzle Growing Up: An Introduction to Item Traits

April 20, 2009

Another major milestone in Bonanzle's development was reached today when we added detailed "Item Traits" for our categories. "Item traits" is the name we've given to structured data fields we're now taking. For example, if you are listing a handbag, there may be item traits available for "material," "brand," and "main color."

Why is this a big deal?

Red or yellow or green or blue? With item traits, you'll find that shoe!

1. More structured data = easier for buyers to browse inventory. Without item traits, there is no structured way to browse for a "red" necklace or "Leather" handbag or an "Action" movie or a "Size 10" shoe. Bigger ecommerce sites than Bonanzle have previously given statistics that sellers can see sales boosted by 30% or more by giving detailed trait information for their items.
2. A more natural way to give Google Attributes. We admit it: setting up Google Attributes for your items can be confusing and time consuming. It can be hard to know which attributes to use for a given category. To improve this situation, we have setup our item traits to automatically map to corresponding Google Attributes where possible. So if you specify your purse is "Leather," we'll automatically add a Google Attribute for [[material: leather]]. You can still manually add Google Base Attributes where you please, but we're hoping that item traits will make Google Attributes more of an afterthought -- only needed by the true Bonanzle overachiever.
3. Easier to give item recommendations (future). In eying our future plans to give buyers smart recommendations on what items they might like, traits are a no-brainer way to figure out similarities between items. The more we know about which items are similar, the more relevant our future recommendations can be.

In the long term, we believe the the benefits of getting structured information about items is going to vault Bonanzle's usability to buyers to a new echelon. In the short term, you probably won't notice much of a difference. We are going to wait about two weeks before we add item traits to Bonanzle search, to give sellers an opportunity to setup the traits for their items. And we're still probably at least a month away from buyer recommendations. But in building for the future, we see item traits as a key strategic underpinnning of how Bonanzle can continue to build its reputation among buyers as not only a fun place to shop, but also an efficient place to shop.

Note that, as yet, we aren't importing item traits via our item importers, but I'm hoping to get that implemented within the next couple days.

I've setup some pretty detailed help pages to get our existing sellers off on the right foot in setting up traits for their items. There are three different ways you can specify traits for your items -- we spent quite a bit of time trying to think through how to make this task as painless as possible, even for those with hundreds or thousands of items.

Given the number of systems touched by this change, I'd expect some anomalies during its first day or two of existence. We'll be listening to your reports via support and any issues with item traits fixed up as soon as can be or so.

Update: Most people have already noticed this, but I'd like to specifically point out that Google attributes no longer show up on the new item form because it was confusing and problem causing. You can still add your attributes on the form if you must, but we highly recommend using the batch editor, which is less error prone. You can still see what attributes you have set by looking there.