New are the figures for the first quarter of 2009. New is the bobPay-EFT payment method. And very soon, there will be more novelties

The respectable figures for the first three months of 2009 are actually nothing new: they are a continuation of the upward trends consistently experienced in the past. This is how the January, February and March 2009 on bidorbuy compare with the same period the year before:

• 69% more registered users
• 97% more new listings
• 84 % increase in gross value of items sold on site
• 67% more active buyers
• 52% more active sellers

Today, bidorbuy has over 360,000 registered users. On average, every month during the past three months 20,000 buyers purchased about 55,000 items from 5,500 sellers to the total value of R21 million.

This is where bobPay-EFT comes in.

Internet payment is by far the most popular method of payment on bidorbuy. Since in 75 percent of the cases buyers and sellers belong to different banks, many days are lost waiting for the money paid by the buyers to materialise in the sellers’ account.

bobPay-EFT makes those transactions faster and easier. Providing that the buyer and the seller bank with any of the four big financial institutions (Absa, FNB, Nedbank or Standard Bank), using bobPay-EFT will render internet transfers practically instantaneous.  Payment from or into other banks will still be subject to delays.

All sellers would do well to offer bobPay-EFT as one of payment options. Their customers will be happier, because they will be able to pay for a purchase without leaving bidorbuy. They will not have to open their own internet banking, attempt to create a new beneficiary, wait for the one-time password, continue creating new beneficiary, stop in order to hunt around for the correct bank branch name and number… You get the picture.

There is one more reason why sellers should embrace bobPay-EFT. Payments made via this method are automatically matched with orders. That means that the seller will not need to spend hours poring over bank statements, manually allocating the monies received.

For all those reasons, bobPay-EFT is really a must for all sellers. This payment option is currently free of charge. A nominal administrative fee may be introduced later on, but it is likely to be well under fees charged for credit card transactions.

And as for “more novelties” promised in the subtitle of this entry – keep an eye on the bidorbuy home page and be the first to notice the change!