Welcome to Treasurebee® and thank you for joining our Beta launch.
For Sellers, Treasurebee is your own personal sales channel. Whether it’s your retail shop, your estate sale, home, garage sale, office or another unique location you’re selling from, you now have a live platform to showcase what you have and speak face to face with customers. Treasurebee includes a variety of features and tools for you to manage your sales and purchases, and a unique messaging feature where transactions can be accomplished in real time. For larger purchases, Treasurebee provides an interface where multiple items can be purchased spontaneously by customers, with only a single transaction. See Completing a Transaction–>How Offers Are Made Using the Messaging Feature in Getting Started.
For Buyers, Treasurebee’s sellers and categories are an aggregate of sellers, live sales events and items for sale from enthusiast communities. They are people who collect, specialize in, buy, trade and sell a wide variety of antiques, collectables, special products, design elements, interesting art, objects, eclectic items and Transient Merchandise (transient merchandise is what you find at garage sales, or the contents of a storage locker cleanout, or someone’s “estate” sprawled out unceremoniously on a driveway or at a table at a local flea market).
Treasurebee’s Live Events category is where you’ll find temporary sales events. Why did we want to provide everyone the ability to host an estate sale live and then be prominently displayed? Because the variety of inventory found at estate sales, garage sales, flea markets, and swap meets is what collectors, dealers, enthusiasts, designers, compulsive garage sale shoppers and re-sellers love. Artifacts, natural objects, crafts, vintage clothing and almost every other form of manufactured products…many of which are valuable, hard to find or nostalgic may show up for sale one day at a live event of this type…then they’re gone.
Sellers and For Sale are the other primary categories. Why Sellers as an individual category? Because we think people are interested in other people and the stories they have to tell. We know that a great storyteller can be quite informative and entertaining. And a good story can transform an ordinary item into something magical. Many sellers of specialty goods are also experts in their field, and many are funny, eccentric and quirky, making them a little more interesting. Treasurebee’s seller categories represent broad designations that cover a wide range of seller types. As a convenience for sellers, you can opt NOT to post specific items For Sale. Just log in and appear Online, ready to speak with and sell to your customers. See Getting Started and blog article “When Things Get Slow“ for more.
The For Sale category is similar to other marketplaces for posting items, except buyers have the option to text message with sellers, video call sellers, and complete transactions in real time.
Whac a Mole: Timing is always a consideration when you make a purchase. Understanding the time constraints a seller has to part with his or her inventory, will help you determine your timing strategy. Competition for antiques and collectibles is fierce. Hordes of dealers, collectors and resellers aggressively pursue the very limited amount of collectibles and antiques floating around out there. Treasurebee provides an ever changing source of inventory from a variety of seller types, available at different times depending on the nature and location of their sale event. We call this the “Whac a Mole effect” where sellers in different time zones, appearing at an ever changing variety of live sales events, provide random purchasing opportunities to those buyers who act first. A happy consequence of this “Gamification” is not merely addictive fun, but some buyers will acquire valuable merchandise for their business or collection, based partly on their tenacity and skill, along with a little luck.
Thank you for participating in Treasurebee’s Beta launch. We will constantly be making improvements wherever we can to make the user interface and transactional features easy for both sellers and buyers. Please contact us if you have any questions on, suggestions related to, or good stories about using Treasurebee.