26 new products coming up

It's been quiet on Flipz.be. We have been busy doing all kind of things in preparing our next big move. Our customers have been begging us for new products, and can finally announce that these are coming. Not less than 26 new products will be added to our catalog over the next few days. That's our biggest addition yet.

So stay tuned!

1000 likes on Facebook!

Today, after only a few months, we have already passed 1000 "likes".

Like a lot of other websites we feature an "I Like" button provided by Facebook. It tracks how many people actually like our site and want to tell their friends about it. Once clicked, everyone can dislike it again, make the counter go down again.

As of today, 1000 different people have told the world they like our side. Actually, it means that the group of people that likes our site is 1000 more than the group that doesn't.

That is quite a big number. And we feel very honored by it.

Thank you!

New formula for reserve prices

Summer's in the air. This will be the 3rd Summer since we started Flipz.be in 2009. So we already know what that means: more people outside and less people before their computers. Last summer we introduced our reserve prices along with our unique bonus system after we had to ship yet another PS3 for €0.06 (really happened!).

With this year's summer in mind, we are slightly tuning this system. The reserve prices will be set using a more sophisticated curve. Many articles, mostly the cheaper ones, will see a lower reserve price. Where the most expensive items, especially those over €1000, will now get a much higher reserve price.

This will allow us to continue our business even when the sun is shining and the weather is so nice nobody wants to stay in. We can still offer our products on a daily basis like we do now. The serious players can still grab whatever they want. And because of the greater diversity in the reserve prices. More items will actually be sold, while other players will be able to create a bigger bonus.

After all, the next autumn will arrive sooner as we'd all like. And it's always nice to have lots of flipz ready by then... :)

Even faster than before!

Starting today, we'll be using a compiled code for Flipz.be. Thanks to this improvement, it will be able to handle all actions in an even more fluent way. The system will therefore be under a lot less stress while providing the exact same functionality. This will assist us in the further development and expansion of the site. While it saves us on hardware.

For you, dear participant, it means that the site will be even more responsive. Everything will feel faster and smoother. And that we will soon be able to offer you more auctions at once... Stay tuned for that!

Flipz.be to welcome residents out of 10 more EU countries!

Up until now, Flipz.be has been limited to only 13 EU-countries. The main reason for this is because we need to be able to actually deliver all the things we sell on the site. That means having a local distributor. And that's not an easy task if you're not physically in that country, or if you don't speak the language.

Today, we are happy to announce that we will soon be opening up to residents of the following list of EU countries:

• Czech Republic
• Estonia
• Greece
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Hungary
• Poland
• Portugal
• Slovenia
• Slovakia

This brings the total number of counties to 23! All these people can now subscribe and participate in the auctions. They have 4 languages to pick from: Dutch, French, English or German. With a 5th one, Italian, being added shortly.

This is your chance to start recruiting "followers" (~ referrals) in those new countries, using your personal link. That way you will be rewarded some free flipz every time they buy some!

COMING SOON to www.flipz.be !

Italian version is coming!

We have noticed something very strange lately. For a very long time, Flipz.be has only been available in Dutch, French and English. However, people from 13 EU-countries were allowed to sign up and participate. They had to do so in one of these three languages though.

Well, to be honest, that didn't really work out as well as we had hoped. Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France have been a success from the day they opened. But people in the other 9 countries were just not biting... Except for Italy!

Today, the Italians already make up the 4th biggest nationality on Flipz.be. They are larger in numbers than people from the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Austria and the Scandinavian countries all together! They seem to prefer English. But French and Dutch are also in use in Italy. And remember when we launched the German version a while back, well guess what the nationality of the first subscriber was? A German-speaking Italian!

So it's fair to say that the Italians seem to love Flipz.be!

That's why we will soon launch a version of Flipz.be completely in Italian.

Coming soon to www.flipz.be !

German version has been launched!

A few days ago we put up a teaser "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

Today we can proudly announce that the German version is live! It is the 4th language to be added to Flipz.be, after Dutch, French and English. But this is the only language so far, which we cannot speak ourselves.

We can now welcome all German speakers in their own language!

If you know people who had a hard time with Dutch, French or English, then now is the time to pass them your personal link and make them followers. This will earn you a whole lot of free flipz. And there are more than 150 million German-speaking Europeans out there to reach. So what are you waiting for? Contact them right now... :)

New English version to be launched this week

The English version of Flipz.be has been around for about a year now. But it has been translated by yours truly, and I am not a native speaker. The text is full of types and other mistakes and some translations are a bit too liberal.

But that will change... A proper English translation is ready! It will be launched this week! It is currently scheduled for Saturday, which is low-traffic day for the site.

(The "Rules"-page has always been a professional translation. It will stay the way it is, don't worry)

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Did you know that German is the most widely spoken language in Europe?

It is the official language of Germany and Austria. But also one of the official languages in Belgium, our home country. And then there are all the surrounding countries with big German minorities: Italy, Denmark, The Netherlands,... Switzerland has a German majority, but it is currently still excluded from participating Flip.be because we have a hard time finding distributors.

Reasons enough to add a German version of the site to Flipz.be. A professional translation of the Dutch version is nearly completed, and will be launched shortly.

We welcome all Germans, Austrians and other German speaking Europeans!

Coming soon, to www.flipz.be !

New games are coming...

Good news for all you gamers out there. Starting this Monday, we will be adding 5 new video games to our product list:

Crysis 2

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

. PC (Windows)

Mortal Kombat

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

Duke Nukem Forever

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

Lego Star Wars III

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

. Nintendo Wii

. Nintendo DS

. Nintendo 3DS

FIFA 11

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

. Nintendo Wii

. Nintendo DS

. Sony PSP

. PC (Windows)

Coming soon, on Flipz.be ....

Flipz.be launches iPad 2 at € 0 !

Apple launches the iPad 2 tonight. And we will be right there from the start!

Tonight, we will sell our first iPad 2 in an auction, starting at €0, and WITHOUT RESERVE PRICE! This means it will definitely be sold. Possibly for only a few cents.

But it gets better! Because we have also limited this auction to people who have not won more than 10 times. This excludes quite a lot of people. The big winners have easily won more than 20 times, some of which have gone over 30 or more!

With them out of picture, along with the lack of a reserve price. Who knows where it will end. Who will be hard-headed enough? Who will take the risk? Who will take home that first European iPad 2?

We'll find out tonight!

Many ways to write "Hotmail.com" :)

Today we went through are growing database in order to improve its quality. We had discovered that a lot of the e-mails we sent were being bounced because of non-existing addresses. That is not a good thing; mailing to non-existing receivers can be seen as an act of spamming. And that's something we want to avoid by all cost.

So we were looking at the giant log files of the mails we sent out over the last few days, as well as the warnings/errors they had generated. We found out that a lot of the e-mail addresses of our members were misspelled because of typos. Many of these people probably never even received their activation link after subscribing!

The obvious typos we corrected by hand. And what we noticed raised one big question: How many ways are there to misspell "hotmail.com"?! We will give you some of the ones we encountered:

• hotmail.com.be
• hotmail.co
• hotmeil.com
• htmail.com
• hottmail.com
• hotmaill.com
• hotamail.com
• otmail.com
• hotmaikl.com
• hptmail.com
• ...

No kidding, we actually found each and every one of the examples above!

Now, that may appear normal. After all, typos are only human. And these mistakes can easily be overlooked by anyone. But our question is: How come GMail addresses are being written correctly?! Sure, there are 7300 Hotmail users for only 2700 GMail users. But still. We corrected dozens of badly written Hotmail addresses, and only two (2!) badly written GMail addresses!

What explains this odd phenomenon? Well, we are still scratching our heads. We still have no clue. We are just guessing that "hotmail" is in fact a difficult word to write, where "gmail" clearly is not.

Any better explanation is by all means welcome!

Internet Explorer down to 16%

When Internet Explorer 4 came out, somewhere in the late nineties, it was a revolution. It completely trashed the competition in superiority. Up until that point Netscape had had a monopoly on decent web browsers to such a level that they could even charge quite a lot of money for it. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4 was not only free, it also had a much better support for the then-new HTML 4 and CSS. For years to come, Internet Explorer would win users from Netscape. More than 80% of all WWW traffic, would be surfed with Microsoft's browser.

Those days are finally over *. Today, we are experiencing a new era in the evolution of the WWW, and Microsoft is too late, too slow and too weak. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari,... they are all faster, more stable, and a lot more secure. And they too are all free!

Also, for some reason Microsoft stopped producing Unix and Mac versions of Internet Explorer (yes, we has those for a while). So while other operating systems are slowly replacing Windows on our computers, especially Mac OS X and GNU/Linux, so are those alternative browsers.

Today we ran a scan through our log files to find out which web browser our visitors prefer. And this is what we've come up with: *

1. Firefox at 46%
2. Google Chrome at 18%
3. MS Internet Explorer at 16%
4. Apple Safari at 16%
5. Opera at 1%

And YES, we like this! Why? Well, maybe because we notice that Internet Explorer is not responding well to www.flipz.be. That is, of course, a very personal reason. But a correct one, nonetheless. The reason why it is not liking our site, is because Microsoft seems to keep on ignoring the standards in CSS and JavaScript, pushing their own flavours.

Will Internet Explorer 9 be better? Well, let's hope so! But I am guessing they are too stubborn to comply to the Internet's open standards. Even when they're already down to 16%, coming from 80%. I have tried IE9 on Flipz.be, and there is already one big improvement: the images on the bid-buttons are finally drawn the way they should've been all along.

* One very important notice: these are the numbers from our site. Every site will have different numbers since every site has a different audience. But still, it is nice to know that our visitors have been enlightened.

Facebook "I Like" integration

You will now find an "I Like" button on our Flipz.be website. This way you can recommend our system to others.

And there is also a big advantage for you! Whenever you send people to Flipz.be (in the hopes they will sign up as your referral so you get free flipz out of them), they will now see you actually like the site! Also, they may find other friends liking it as well. This should persuade them to follow your example.

That will keep the free flipz coming...

Better English

We are reworking the English version of the website. The current version has been around for a while, but was translated by a programmer.

As English is slowly becoming a more important language, we decided to have it properly done by an actual translator :)

Coming soon to www.flipz.be/en

Alternatives to PayPal

Ever since we started in 2009, we have supported PayPal as the only way to buy more flipz.

We are currently looking into other means of payment, especially for the Belgian market. People may prefer to buy flipz using their home banking system such as the ones by KBC or ING. We think we may reach more people that way.

Other countries will follow. But the problem is that we are not really that aquatinted with the local banks in every country. There are also a lot of cultural differences. In some countries people send cheques to companies. In some countries banks are working together to create a single online platform, in others, every bank has got its own...

But one thing is for sure. You will soon be able to buy flipz without PayPal.

New BONUS System launched

From now on, the new BONUS System is in place.

So for auctions that didn't reach their reserve price, all flipz will still be returned along with a bonus of 5% extra flipz.

The last bidder of that auction, however, will now receive 20% extra flipz instead of 5%.

Let's say you have spent 60 flipz on such an auction. Well then, you'll get at least 60+5% = 63 flipz back onto your account. But if you were the last one to bid, you'd get 60+20% = 72 flipz back! That's a huge difference!

We think this will make our game more exciting from the very start until the end. Whatever the outcome may be.

Flipz BONUS System about to change

We are currently working on a more exciting Flipz Bonus system.

In the current implementation, when an auction does not reach its reserve price, all invested flipz are returned to all participants. They are all being rewarded with a 10% bonus worth of extra flipz. In reality this means that today, if you have clicked 64 times on an auction that was not sold, you will get 64+10% = 64+6 = 70 flipz back onto your account.

This works like a charm! In fact, we see a lot of people just doing that and nothing else. They like the idea of "planting and harvesting" their flipz on a daily basis, making a lot of free flipz along the way. It is a great way to grow your stash.

But... apart from that... it is not very exciting.

Therefore, the system will change slightly. In the next version of Flipz.be, the bonus will be only 5%. But the last bidder will be rewarded with a very nice 20%!

Some stats: on average, we are currently injecting about 800 free extra bonus flipz into our system on a daily basis. Those are 800 flipz nobody paid for, hence devaluating the average value of a flipz. But they do help to increase the price in a fair and honest way. We expect this won't change as conscious bidders are likely to push the auction as close to the reserve price as possible. Optimizing on their benefits. And in the mean time helping out the other people who actually want it to reach the reserve price.

Coming soon, on www.flipz.be !

Sneak-peaks at the next Flipz.be

We have created this blog to keep you posted on what keeps us busy. What is going on behind the scenes? What will be changing in the near future? How about some stats every now and then?

Follow this blog, and you will find out.