PanDimMar LLC
FurBuy is now a portal site member of a larger initiative for fandom sales and marketing called Pan-Dimensional Marketplace LLC. This company is a partnership of people from a varied number of genres and interests who have come together to leverage one set of servers and software that can cater to and meet the needs of several communities at once rather than just one. For those of you whose only interest is things of a furry nature this will have little impact - however many of you are also involved in other genres or fandoms and this may be a great boon to you as your account will cross all of these pan-dimensional gateways. More information will be released about PanDimMar (including it's own website) in the coming weeks.
Ad Banners
As part of our need to generate revenue in order to pay for the servers and bandwidth, we are now hosting ad banners on the FurBuy site. Many of you have likely already noticed them, and the traffic and click-through rates right now is extremely impressive - better than we usually see with Google far and away. Homepage Block ads are ONLY $5/month and Auction Footer banners a mere $10/month, so for the results these are a great deal! And the July special is still underway - buy a slot for August right now and you'll get the rest of July FOR FREE. Please consider an ad banner as every slot we sell helps keep the site running, and click on ads that interest you as every click keeps advertisers coming back! For more information, see our Ad Banners Page.
Contributing Memberships
As a more important part of our need to generate revenue and keep our servers running, we are offering Contributing Memberships which will give you drastically improved features on the site. For a trivial $1.50 per month (purchased in one-year increments of $18) you can access these advanced features, which will include increased image storage space, larger auction image sizes, unlimited auction postings at once, increased use of Hot Items images, increased use of Image Gallery images, placement in our Seller Spotlight listings page, a Secure Auction feature, and more features to come as we continue developing and improving FurBuy. We will be posting a Contributing Memberships page on FurBuy detailing pricing and payment information in the next few days. (If you just can't wait, contact me directly and I'll give you the information privately. =)
Free Account Restrictions
Probably the most controversial news is that we will be beginning to limit some features and abilities on Free User accounts on FurBuy. However, as we have promised for years, the site and the features you're already familiar with will ALWAYS remain free to users. Just in a more limited way. Free accounts will be limited to 7 live auctions at any one time, 3 Image Gallery images at any one time, and only 1 Hot Item image at any one time. Free Users will also have limited or no access to many of the new special features coming soon or being developed. This restriction will begin as soon as July 20, so if you really want to post a ton of stuff without becoming a Contributing Member you have a few days left to do it!
FurBuy Support Project Outcome
The Support Project was a huge success. Thanks to the generous contributions of our sellers and bidders, we raised $1234.34 (after Paypal fees) in order to make all this happen. Sellers who contributed $25 or more have already been granted their 1-year Contributing Memberships which will "officially" start August 1st but have been granted July for free (which will become important once the Free User restrictions go into effect on July 20th). We are still compiling data on sellers who contributed via bids, but will have their titles and membership in place by July 20th as well. The money was spent for a couple new rack-mount servers, datacenter setup fees, and the first month of datacenter usage. A generous donor who asked to remain anonymous paid for the mid-July to mid-August datacenter usage fee of $400, many thanks to them to give us the leeway to get everything in place!
400 Live Auctions
To end things on a happy note and strong sign of success, as of the time of this posting FurBuy has 400 live auction currently running! This is a new record, and hopefully one that will be broken many times to come. =) Thanks to all of you for your support and ongoing patronage!
Your Thoughts, Questions and Concerns
As always, we not only WANT to hear from you and know what you think about these changes and other aspects of our system, but we really NEED to hear from you. It is NEVER a bother to us, and every piece of feedback helps guide us to deliver a better service to you. If you ever have something to share, something to request, or some frustration or concern with the system or it's users, PLEASE let us know. We take all feedback seriously and share it with all of our admins and partners and discuss the direction we take based on what you are all thinking and asking for. The more you talk and the more you ask for, the more you'll get. Really. Try us. =)
