GunsAmerica finally fixed the search.

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Hi Everyone. I don't know how many of you are on our mailing list, but we finally fixed the screwed up search. It is part of our 5.0 interface that we will be rolling out over the summer.

Believe it not, people have been complaining for years about it and I never understood their criticism. But this past year at SHOT talking to people I had a few people take me over to our computer kiosk station and show me, look, when you search for smith & wesson model 10, you get all this other crap and no model 10s. Turns out that when this was made, our head programmer put in something called a "greedy" smart search, so when your search returned only a few items, it looked into our "family" system (which are groups of categories that are related, like .308 battle rifles, over under shotguns etc.) and grabbed stuff to glue onto your search.

BUT they weren't sorted by relevance! OMG what an idiot, and what an idiot I was to not listen closely to people's complaints. You COULD refine your search to get what you wanted, with one click (just click on SW revolvers on the left) but who the heck wants to do that.

So it's finally fixed. There are still some bugs with individual cases (like a weird one with the word nagant that is now fixed), but overall it is very tight, fast, and finally gives you what you want.

The rest of the interface problems that are left over from the disaster in early '08 are in the works, and it is the easiest and most powerful interface we have ever had.

Please post this around on your boards and facebook and what not. We have a LOT of old friends who just couldn't deal with it anymore and I'm sure they would like to know. We have emailed our list, but people change emails a lot and I'm sure a lot of them haven't been told and would like to know.

Please post your comments here if you have some input, and as always, the customer service contact works and is answered quickly. The way we find a lot of these small case bugs is by people telling us. Thanks as always for your support and patience.
 
Thanks for listening!

I've been using GunsAmerica for years and have always had a problem with the search :banghead: - until I figured out the links on the side of the page. I was a bit wary of the new search function, but I'll tell you what - I'm finding exactly what I'm looking for. And I really like the easy Go Local function. I'm an impatient buyer, and when I want it, I want it now!!! Now I can find out if someone near me has it. I do have one question though - I'm a bit confused by the listings that show "click for price" and have multiple sellers. What are those?

-da
 
Thanks for the compliments. Believe me they are welcome. :)

The click for price ads are "Guns On Demand." It is a thing we set up with the manufacturers so that they could give us all of their guns in production and we post them all for sale, then the dealers sign up with how much they sell them for and how much they want you to put down to order it. It works really well. So far we have Beretta, Remington, Mossberg, Kahr, Springfield Armory, Sako, Tikka, Rock River, Zoli, a couple others. Eventually we will cover everything with it. If you can't find someone selling something specific you want it can be very useful.
 
Yes it was rather flawed but thankfully since I only use GA as a classified ad type site I am not too ruffled about it.

If I were searching for auctions where time was of the essence and could not keyword search directly, I would never have used GA.
 
Yes, we are building out the auction side of the site more in the next version and correcting a couple usability quirks they have. We also have improved the save search function greatly, so if you are logged in you will see it there at the top, to save it, and name it, like "remington 700s under $500" kind of thing, so when you want to search for that again you have one click.

Another cool thing is that you can now use your browser bookmarks to revisit searches. We are using all "get" requests in the application, which means that the URL in your browser is a long string of the variables you are sending into the search. If you use the bookmarking utility in your browser, it will return to that exact search, and you can name it in the browser, again, something that makes you remember what it is. This is opposed to a "post" request in which the variables are not saved at the browser level, and cannot be bookmarked with all of the variables you have chosen. A little TMI I know for many people, but I'm sure there are web geeks reading this who will say oh that's cool.
 
So On Demand is the same thing as a manufacturer's catalog?

I was just playing with that feature and noticed it brings up dealers in my proximity who will get that gun for me if I request it. That's handy
 
I have not gone to Guns America for many months, if not longer. I reckon it is time to try again.
 
Thanks for the clarification on the price on request/on demand system - that's pretty cool. I didn't know so many actual dealers were active on the site.
 
I never used GA primarily because of the search problems. I will pay it another visit soon. (read now)

Especially in light of how hard it is to use and refine results in GB's new version.

For the love of god just give me the ability to look at only USED items in a SPECIFIC subcategory
 
You can look at used stuff in any subcategory very easily on our search. You can either start at the homepage and select a category to start in, then choose the used options from the left, or just type a keyword like winchester, then click the left subcategories that stuff showed up in. I will post an image of the left bar I am talking about. It has pretty much any option you might want, and they are all save-able as a saved search as I explained, through our saved searches or your browser.
usedguns.jpg

And yes, the On Demand stuff is like tying your search to the actual manufacturer catalogs, then being able to contact your local dealer and order one, at 2am in your underwear. :) We all have to pick up guns at gun dealers. Guns aren't like flash memory that you can have delivered to your door from newegg. You have to get them from the dealers. Why pay shipping and a transfer fee when the local dealer will sell it to you and save you money? That's the thinking with the On Demand system, and more and more dealers are signing up for it.
 
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OH LMAO. I won't comment on how hard you can look for a connection between that word and my competitor.

Mods, I'm not going to turn this into a bashing thing don't worry. :) I did not bring up my competitor. I just know a lot of people were frustrated with the GA search so I posted here that we fixed it.
 
On a related note (while you're here) in the most general sense what's your prospect for the gun auction business as a whole and how's business been over the past year or so?

I have sold a fair amount of guns and gun related items on various online auction sites. But Ive given up even trying recently as it seems as though you can't sell an Eskimo on a warm cup of coffee of late.

Is this just me and what I'm selling? or is it a larger trend.

I took the liberty of taking your search for a spin and it did seem to do quite well. I think the moral to this story is if customers overwhelmingly say something is broken you should listen to them.
 
Yes, that is the moral of that story and I learned it the hard way.

As for the online auction situation, I think it's a reflection of the economy to some extent, and to the boom after Barak Hussein got in. Ultimately everyone had an amount of working capitol for the year that could be used for guns, and everyone went out and shot the wad at once, leaving the industry in a lurch for quite some time.

The auction model as an ad-type itself is weak for guns and I think the consumers are catching on. Guns are almost 100% commoditized. Everyone knows what they go for and nobody sells them for less than they are worth, with the exception of some hard case situations and widows that people take advantage of.

Putting and auction up for a gun is almost an oxymoron for the seller. By definition, people are going to try to pay less than something is worth if they are bidding on an auction. The idea that people will "bid something up" works great for an antique lamp, because you may have 2 people get emotional. They may never see that exact lamp again.

But on guns, its a myth that two people will get emotional on something they can get anywhere. Nobody is going to pay even $10 more than what they see a Sig 226 for, or a Remington 700, or a Mossberg 500, or even an antique Model 12, because there are other listings to view the real prices on, and price books for antiques.

By definition, the seller is getting screwed with an auction on guns. There is very little margin on new guns. 25% is considered highway robbery at the retail level and it is not uncommon for stores to be operating on 15% or less. Compare this to cell phones that have almost 100% markup, other electronics in the 200-300% range, and you'll see why ebay works for some stuff, but not for guns.

We are building out our auctions really just because people want them, sellers, which is nuts. A classified ad works great for the seller because not only can he post the gun indefinitely until the right seat comes along for that saddle, but he can also have complete customer contact as the gun is for sale. So if the consumer wants something close and emails, he can get him one.

This is kind of to make a short story long, but I have an hour long lecture I give on this to gun dealers that I did at SHOT last year. If you care to watch, the link is here. It's long and the lighting wasn't good, but you'll see waht it's about anyway.
 
I'm glad that you listened to everyone's complaints about the search. What can we expect to change next?
 
The Search function here on THR is horrible and similarly, I doubt any one in a position to correct it has ever bothered trying to use it to see how bad it is.

Glad to hear GunsAmerica has fixed theirs!

I had given up searching there...will try it again now that it is fixed.
 
I think the search on THR is actually broken and might be a patch to the PHP application. I've shown this to a couple people and they agreed.

What's coming next is a change to the communication system on GunsAmerica. Right now it is kind of a free for all because we really messed what we fondly call "making the electronic handshake."

You see, on auctions, there is an automatic electronic handshake when an auction closes. On classifieds, where the buyer just contacts the seller and the seller may or may not still have the gun, then they make the sale offline, there is no real automatic electronic handshake.

We are moving to a more intuitive fixed price (buy it now) vs. auction methodology, where the buy it now is a true buy it now and you don't have to jump through all the hoops that we had set up to complete the "electronic handshake."

This one was knew was a problem unlike the search, but fixing it isn't so easy when you have 1-3 million people coming and going on an active website.
 
The auction model as an ad-type itself is weak for guns and I think the consumers are catching on. Guns are almost 100% commoditized. Everyone knows what they go for and nobody sells them for less than they are worth, with the exception of some hard case situations and widows that people take advantage of...
...But on guns, its a myth that two people will get emotional on something they can get anywhere. Nobody is going to pay even $10 more than what they see a Sig 226 for, or a Remington 700, or a Mossberg 500, or even an antique Model 12, because there are other listings to view the real prices on, and price books for antiques.
Click to expand...

I know classifieds are your stock and trade but in my experience this is absolutely untrue. Few people have a good sense of what certain guns--even new guns-- are "worth". If they did than there wouldn't be daily threads in practically every firearms forum asking "what's a good price for XXXX?" Besides, the value of something is only what people are willing to pay--and auctions, for all their flaws, tell you exactly that. Online classifieds do not--the only thing they tell is you whether an item offered at a certain price sold. In other words, if you see a completed online classified ad for, say, a S&W Registered Magnum offered at $250, all this tells you is that that gun was worth at least $250. That's it.

Economics makes the irrationale assumption that buyers are totally rationale. That is, if they want an item they will be able to research its exact value, weigh whether the item is worth the price and seek out and buy it if it is. I can promise you that is not how the vast majority of people shop. The recent Obamasteria, where rumors and scare tactics moved a lot of overpriced inventory, is ample evidence of that. Before that happened, I once bought a .22 pistol online and watched another pistol of the same model on the same site at the same time go for more than twice the amount I paid. This was not the behavior of rationale buyers with unlimited access to information.

First, the firearms market is incredibly complicated and things that appear to be the same may have radically different values. There is a huge variation in the amount of information buyers have, which is part of the reason forums like this exist in the first place. That is, if buyers even bother to comparison shop, which is becoming a lost art in this age of instant gratification.

Second, where exactly are all these reliable price guides you talk about? There are scads of firearms "blue books" that are outdated practically the second they're published. I know, I have several and they are laughably inaccurate. It is shocking that you would assume that people can magically find price information when your own site--probably the biggest online firearms classifieds there is--went without a decent search function for years. That makes the only accurate, up to the minute source of firearms values . . .wait for it: online auctions.

Last, you seem to subscribe to the suprising view that guns are just manufactured widgets that defy emotional attachment. This may be more true for newly-made, mass-produced, readily available guns, but anyone who has seen a bidding war for a pre-war Colt pistol will know this is also totally false.
 
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I didn't say there was no place for auctions in firearms. Obviously for things that there are extremely limited numbers of an auction is the only format that will show you the genuine value today of the firearm.

But other than that you may wish guns were emotional, and I may even feel that the guns I personally collect are things that are emotional, but I have tested this theory (using both GA and GB) on everything from commodity pistols to specific antiques, like a real '86 Winchester lever shotgun. Most recently I ran matching M44 nagants through both GA and GB (no I won't show you my covert accounts) and they closed $15 different than each other, both under $100. When those guns were plentiful they were going for $79 and now you don't see them much under $150.

I have proven this time and again. If you don't believe me, try it. Go post a gun for sale at GA at middle of the road retail, and auction one on GB starting at a penny (none of this using auctions like classifieds with high reserves and buy it nows). See how much you get for your guns in the end. I predict that the gun will be sold on GA within a week for what you asked, and the auction will close at minimum 20% below retail. That is the average.

As for people not knowing prices, think about the advice people give here. They say go check GA and GB. Well by the time someone lands at one of us, they know what their gun is worth because they can see others like it.

We do have auctions, and we are tuning them up for people like you who will continue to insist that people get emotional about buying a 100% commoditized product. I challenge you to go find an auction on either GA or GB that is currently above average value and people are in a bidding war. Go show us one. Really. That is why you don't see people auctioning high grade shotguns and high end Colts on the auctions. All the high end stuff ends up on GA for asking price, which is what we will sell them for.
 
But other than that you may wish guns were emotional, and I may even feel that the guns I personally collect are things that are emotional, but I have tested this theory (using both GA and GB) on everything from commodity pistols to specific antiques, like a real '86 Winchester lever shotgun. Most recently I ran matching M44 nagants through both GA and GB (no I won't show you my covert accounts) and they closed $15 different than each other, both under $100. When those guns were plentiful they were going for $79 and now you don't see them much under $150.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry, but the price of the cheapest and most commonly imported surplus rifle is hardly a refutation of people's emotional attachment to certain guns.

If you don't believe me, try it. Go post a gun for sale at GA at middle of the road retail, and auction one on GB starting at a penny (none of this using auctions like classifieds with high reserves and buy it nows).
Click to expand...

What the heck is "middle of the road retail"? Are we talking new guns or used?

I challenge you to go find an auction on either GA or GB that is currently above average value and people are in a bidding war. Go show us one. Really
Click to expand...

Seriously? You actually want me to find evidence of "auction fever"? Sure, no problem. From the last 90 days:

1.) $3000 and 52 bids on a 1974 Python with plastic grips: http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=162191532

Did you want just one? Here a couple more from the last 90 days for Beretta medium frames pistols, which I'm fond of . . . but not this fond of:

2.) $580 and 26 bids for a .380 Beretta Model 70s:
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=170220152
Yikes, I guess this was for someone unwilling to pony up for the .22 version:

3.) $1100 and 14 bids for a NIB .22 Beretta Model 71:
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=167728487
I paid about two hundred dollars each for a 90% M71 and M75 within the last two years, also on GB.

We do have auctions, and we are tuning them up for people like you who will continue to insist that people get emotional about buying a 100% commoditized product.
Click to expand...

I can't get in the heads of these people who bought those guns, but I'm pretty sure they didn't feel like they were buying a 100% commoditized product. Mid-70s Pythons and Beretta medium-framed pistols are not particularly rare, but the bidders for the above auctions sure seemed willing to fight to get them. But please forgive us poor, misguided folks for insisting.
 
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