ATV Lighted Whip Poles & Too Many Other Parts

Since the beginning of December, I have been working on building out our ATV parts site, ATVPartMart.com. The ATV Parts category on eBay Motors currently has almost a million listings in 21 leaf categories. Our usual approach is to create new pages for the most popular items in a niche category like ATV Parts, and to create enough of them with narrow enough focus to make it easy for users to find what they want quickly without scrolling through seemingly endless pages of listings.

That was just not feasible when dealing with a category containing a million listings. I created almost 300 pages, and still most of them have hundreds or even thousands of listings. Scrolling through the list of 300 pages to find the one you want is asking a lot, and assuming a page focused on the product you want exists, it is likely to have far more listings than can be conveniently browsed. At some point, our ATV niche store jumped way over the line to ATV mega-store and I decided it is time to stop. The store is what it is going to be now, and it is at least faster and easier to browse than the parent categories on eBay motors. It also has a search box at the bottom of each page, so customers can find what they want that way.

I usually find something amusing in any niche market, and the items that caught my attention in ATV parts were lighted whips like the ones shown at right. In places where people ride on sand dunes, common sense and the law dictate that ATVs, side by side UTVs, and dune buggies (also called sand rails) display a flag on a long whip pole so that riders who may be just over the dune from one another can see each other coming and avoid collisions.

That sounds pretty dangerous, but I have done it when touring the western United States and at reasonable speeds, it’s actually a lot of fun. I was astonished to learn that people actually do it at night! To do that with at least some degree of safety, they need lighted whip poles for ATVs like the ones shown in the picture. It reminded me of the time we put glow-stick collars on a couple of dozen dogs at a party at our house. Watching them all run and play in the dark was hilarious.

I think I would like sitting on a high dune and watching all the crazy people buzz around on ATVs with their lighted whips glowing, but I’m not so sure I would want to actually participate in the fun.