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BidStart is NOT Closing August 5th!
Welcome Home!
This is Mark Rosenberg, the new CEO and owner of bidStart (as of this past Monday, August 1). For those of you who don't know me, I was also the founder of bidStart back in 2005!
As many of you know, bidStart became part of the Stanley Gibbons Group back in 2012, and began to transition into the Stanley Gibbons Marketplace shortly thereafter. Which is likely why, when Stanley Gibbons officially announced last week that the Stanley Gibbons Marketplace would be closing this Friday - August 5, many bidStart members believed this meant that bidStart would be closing as well.
However, I can assure you that bidStart is NOT closing.
As originally announced on July 22, via a joint press release, myself and Stanley Gibbons announced that bidStart was being sold by Stanley Gibbons to myself (and my new venture Hip eCommerce), with the deal set to close no later than August 1. I'm happy to announce that this deal has now closed, and Stanley Gibbons is no longer involved with bidStart.
What is Hip eCommerce?
Hip eCommerce is a company which I started in 2015, and focuses on building communities and marketplaces for individual collectible categories. Those categories currently include comic books through HipComic.com and stamps through HipStamp.com
Within HipComic.com and HipStamp.com, you'll find a wide range of features built exclusively for collectors of comic books and stamps respectively. For example, on HipStamp listings include attributes specific to stamps, such as Country, Catalog Number, Condition, Format, and more - each of which can easily be searched upon. There you will also find our Catalog section, where you can manage your Collection and Want List; as well as browse for items for sale in Country / Catalog order.
Why did Hip eCommerce buy bidStart?
bidStart is home to a great community of collectors, with over 100,000 members and counting, and personally, having founded bidStart over a decade ago, I did not want to see the community we built together disappear. For those of you who remember our Inverted Jenny Giveaway, the Traveling Mousepad and/or the bidStart Girl - I'm sure you feel the same way.
That being said, from a business point of view, bidStart follows a different model than the other business within Hip eCommerce - in that it aims to provide a singular platform for all collectibles. This is a business model which serves different needs than that of HipComic or HipStamp, and I see no reason why bidStart can not also happily exist within the Hip eCommerce family.
What's Next for bidStart?
The current plan for bidStart is to continue to operate it as an independent business and website, mostly as-is and as it does today. However, we will be looking to improve customer service and site reliability. We'll also be restarting general marketing activity shortly.
What's next for HipStamp?
If you're a stamp Buyer or Seller, I would recommend that you explore and consider both bidStart and HipStamp for your stamp collecting needs.
That being said, while bidStart will remain focused on all collectibles, the main focus of HipStamp is of course collectible stamps. All of the new features we develop centered around stamp collecting will be through our HipStamp platform. We'll also be concentrating our advertising and marketing efforts for collectible stamps within the HipStamp brand.
In particular, if you're a stamp Seller on bidStart, you may want to consider opening a store on HipStamp, where you can use HipStamp's bidStart Sync feature to sync all of your inventory from bidStart to HipStamp. This provides an easy way to sell on both sites - and reach more buyers, while not increasing your overhead of managing your inventory across multiple sites.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask (even by responding directly to this email). I'm looking forward to providing more detailed updates soon, and thank you for being a part of our growing community.
Best Regards,
Mark Rosenberg
CEO & Founder Hip eCommerce / bidStart
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Posted 08/02/2016 10:33 pm
