The Monocle & Moustache

The Standby list is a great alternative to scheduling. It’s an opportunity for any seller to list an item in Standby and possibly have it sold in a live auction. How does this work?

In order to move an item into the auction room, it must receive an opening bid. Please note that these bids are real.

The Standby list is available one hour before the auction begins and will last until all of the empty slots in the auction are filled. At that point in time, the Standby list will disappear. The items that receive an opening bid will be auctioned when the scenery moves outdoors.

We hope this helps and happy auctioning!

There are two new features on Tophatter that we think are pretty helpful:

1. Report an item or user - you can now report people or items to Tophatter staff to review and potentially remove.  We rely on the community to police itself and the reporting feature is a great tool for anyone to alert us to items that are misleading, inappropriate or spammy.  Simply click the ‘report’ link on the bottom of the lot description or user avatar page.   

2. Notes to sellers - We know that a lot of custom items are ordered on Tophatter, and sometimes communications get lost after the sale.  We have therefore added a ‘notes’ field to the checkout process so that buyers can inform sellers of their requests, and sellers know where to find these instructions.

We think these are two important steps forward. 

For all of you addicted to Tophatter, soon you’ll be able to access the auctions from your iphone using our Tophatter app.  We’ve been working on the application for a while and we’re really excited to make it available soon.

We’re looking for users that are interested in helping us test the app and provide feedback.  Any comments/suggestions/thoughts are welcome.

Anyone of you who is interested in testing out the app and has an iPhone, can you please send an email at suchit@tophatter.com. Suchit will then add everyone to the testing group and send out a version of the app that you can install on your phone.

Thanks!

What a week at Tophatter!  Just three months since we launched we are now seeing over 1,000 items per day up on the auction blocks.   While we’re thrilled with this growth, we know there are certain aspects of the marketplace that we’d like to improve and we’re working every day to make things better.

One initiative that we started this week was one-off promotional credits in different auctions - we ran a $5 credit in Accessories on Wednesday, a $2 credit in Accessories yesterday, and both a $2 credit in Antique & Viintage and whopping $10 credit in High-end Jewelry today.

Wendell is generously paying for these credits as part of our marketing efforts to attract buyers and boost the overall experience.  So far, it has been very successful and we plan to do more of it.  We won’t run them every day or in the same auctions repeatedly but we will use credits occasionally as a tool to increase value for sellers.

Thanks everyone for your support!  Remember to set your clock forward on Saturday night - wouldn’t want you to be late for Sunday’s Bazaar :)

We’ve had so much fun with the outdoor fairs this week - and have heard such great feedback - that we’re going to start doing them even more broadly.  If there’s a category where we have a scheduling back-log, you can expect to start seeing outdoor fairs where anyone can schedule in the auction in the near future.  We’re also working to make the fair sign-up experience more intuitive and less distracting.

Speaking of scheduling, we’re also planning a long term feature where anyone will be able to create and run their own auctions.  If you have suggestions for us as we get started or are interested in this feature, please let us know here.