RON: I mean, I go up and let's say, you've got Johnny over here who wants to go sell his Pokemon cards. He's got to be able to go up and figure out how to do that. And he might be 12, 14 years old trying to figure out how to do that. But then you might have professional sellers that are out there that are power sellers that have 10,000 auctions a year on there and it's got to be able to serve both. So with the self-service capability, not only is it helpful for those people selling, you've got to be able to be someone like me going out there. And I have to be able to distinguish and find and tell the difference between these power sellers—if I'm trying to make a large purchase—versus somebody new or somebody potentially trying to rip people off. So it has to be very flexible and self-service for both the buyers and the sellers.
We've got to be able to upload all my assets for validation. So how do I become a power seller? How does the company, how do you audit and monitor the system as it's going through so that you can ban those people that aren't doing a good job? Is reviews enough? Is there something additional to auditing? So obviously the fact that there's a term called power sellers and the views and the ratings are there, that's a big significant part of that, right? You've got to have a notification system. If I want to bid on an item in a particular eAuction software, do I just have to sit there and watch the item the whole time? Well, sure if it's a 15 minute auction, but if you've ever purchased on eBay, these things are usually going on for many days, right? You put it in there and I don't remember the default it's been a bit, but it's like a week or eight days is the default.
So if I put a bid and then I go back and get busy, but that item was important to me I should be notified proactively if somebody outbids me. And then you've obviously got to have with that, the maximum bid capabilities and then it'll notify me that I've been outbid, but my max bid has kept me in the game, but I'm coming up on my max bid if I don't want to lose the item.
CHRIS: So one of the things I would say to those features is if you're hearing these features and you're thinking, "I don't necessarily need these for my business." I would suggest considering thinking what variation might your business benefit from over the long term. And if you're thinking "my business does need these things, but they're even more high fidelity than what you guys are talking about," I would also note that we are going to be going into a lot more detail and more of our multi-part series videos. So I just want to encourage you, these are some of the core features in an eAuction sites that you ought to at least allow yourself to consider and allow yourself to think ahead, three to five years in the ideal scenario, would this be something you would need to have thought of and planned for?
And so absolutely I could not agree more, Ron, with the concept of validating, making sure that these accounts have the proper validation and verification and making it a self-service process is effectively a requirement at scale.
Whenever we work with clients, our goal typically is to help them go from a SaaS-based eCommerce model that they've really been painted into a corner with to a very catered, integrated, and self-service model. And so that really requires not just the technical solution, but also the business solution of identifying we're going to make this as self-service as possible. We can execute on the technical application of that. It's important for you as the business owner or as the leader of the technical side of this, the planner, et cetera, for you to determine how does the business need this to go.
RON: Right. Yeah. Good points. Couldn't agree more on that with the validation. And again, Chris made a reminder that this is a multi-part series. We will definitely drill into this. This is, as the overview webinar today, we're just going to do a high level skirt across these and dive in much, much deeper into each of these as we go forward in the series.
So the next thing we'll touch base on is obviously the ability to take money and ship the product, right? I mean, that's the basics have the auction once you get through the timed part of it. You've got to have a platform that can take multicurrency payment types. So some of the thing you got to think about here, am I only dealing with North America? So now do I have to deal with just Canadian dollars and US dollars? What happens if somebody overseas orders? I've certainly gone on eBay and purchased things overseas.
Am I dealing with the EU where I have to deal with that tax? How am I going to handle with shipping logistics? If I put a flat rate shipping of $6.95, and somebody from Europe buys this item, it's going to cost a heck of a lot more than that. So how am I going to deal with that? So there's a lot of implications you want to think about on the platform, on how you want to allow that. Are you just going to force everybody to only be from Canada and America? And then even then, are you going to add French and Canadian dollar currency exchange? How going to deal with returns if you're also dealing with overseas, things like that, right?
So simple things like handling different payment types, shipping, logistics, tax calculations, and returns. That's kind of the biggest things that you want to talk about. And then obviously the big one we talked about a little bit on a previous item is the status of your auction, keeping you up to date and the ratings, right? The ratings and the reviews. Chris, we you got anything to add on?
CHRIS: I think you nailed it. It's really important and there's a lot of depth to it. Absolutely fundamental to the business. Couldn't agree more.
RON: So the next one is almost like a standard traditional eCommerce platform feature, right? Whenever we go to a website that's eCommerce the big thing is we want to go to the catalog, right? We're online shopping and we're looking at a catalog. And an auction site really is no different and that's kind of the difference between if you look at the features of an auction site, you've got to be able to go in and find things. One of the auction sites we worked with was a real estate auction site. And so they had all kinds of different buyers and people that would list those properties, right? It might be a single person listing a property or an agency broker with many different listing agents or an agent listing a property.
But the buyer profile is just as different. They could be a single person looking for a house. You know, we live here in Austin, so a single person moving to Austin might come in here and say, "All right, I'm looking for a home for my family. It's got to be able to have four bedrooms, three baths." So all the basic type of filter stuff, but even more importantly, here in Austin, we've had such an explosion recently, and it's not just a lot of people moving to Austin. It's a lot of investors coming to Austin, looking for homes to come in, fix up, and flip. So investors are coming in. They want to be able to go. "I'm looking for all properties of between 2,000 and 2,400 square feet on a quarter acre or smaller." So they've got profiles, and so they want to come in and put alerts and be alerted for every single property that comes in and potentially bid on all of them. So you've got power buyers as well as power sellers.
So the ability to have an extremely robust catalog that cannot only display and show and compare those different items you might want to be bidding on. But the ability to find all the information about it, quickly. Things like, "is it an inventory? How much is shipping? How long is it going to take to get here? What is the pricing? Is there any really technical information? Do they have enough information about liens on the property? Is it in a school zone? Is there shopping nearby?" All the things that you would expect to see on Zillow—does your auction site if you're dealing with real estate offer all that same kind of information that someone looking for real estate would be expected to do?
But if your auction site is also dealing with Pokemon cards, then what does that auction look like? Because now they're looking for card ratings, is it actually sealed? Is it a card rating? What's the condition? Same thing with music. I buy a lot of used vinyl. I'm constantly, when I go to these auctions, looking for what is the condition of the vinyl? Is it new? Is it used, is it repop, things like that. What do you have to say about the catalog, Chris?
CHRIS: I think fundamentally the catalog is kind of the heart of being able to interact with the site. This is something that has a lot of depth to it as well, specifically, really looking at performance, customization. And as you talked about, Ron, there's so much nuance depending on how the business works. And so what I would leave the audience with on this one is to consider where is your business going to go over the next three to five years? And what audiences are you working with? Because you might need to have a different presentation by audience. You may need to have different kinds of capabilities at the core of your eCommerce auction platform to be able to deliver on different mediums. And so this could be mobile and tablet, as well as a typical web browser.
They could also be using a kiosk type of a model or an integrated model, and the list goes on. And so think about where you're going over the next three to five years with this. This is obviously the heartbeat of the eAuction system being able to interact with the items quickly and effectively. And frankly, the way I would say it is if your eAuction platform doesn't meet a baseline standard, it simply will get rejected by users.
RON: Yeah. Good point. And you brought up a really good point that I know our platform does that I haven't really seen elsewhere. You know, when you go buy a common eCommerce platform one of the things people do is they all go out and look at themes and they think that the styling is, and the styling represents the functionality, but it really isn't, right? It's just like, that's the color that we're going to paint the house. That's not the house. That's not the layout of the house or the functionality. It's just, did we throw shutters on it? Did we put a nice front door and what color do we paint and stain the doors and shutters. And that's kind of what you just mentioned about the different layouts.
One of the things our platform can do that I haven't seen [on other platforms] is we can have different styles and layouts within a single product catalog. So in my example, I gave a minute ago, if there's a completely different layout or a different number of features that need to be available for a used vinyl record versus a piece of real estate, then maybe we need to have multiple types of templates for the different types of auctions there are. Which kind of brings me to the next one when it's different types of events, those could be the different types of auction types. So this kind of falls into two buckets, the different types of auction types might be online, in person, time-based events. Is there reserve, no reserve events, custom events?
Silent bidding is one that we came to with the real estate, right? And group-based events. So that could be different types of events, but then different types of events could be classification of products. So for the vinyl records, I have to have maybe it's vinyl records, sports memorabilia, Pokemon cards, all the things that are collected that have a condition and a rating and things like that have a different type of layout than real estate, which has to have things like, is it within walking distance? Is it in an HOA or a HUD? Are there schools nearby? What's the location of the property? Does it have a survey map? All those different types of things, it'll have nothing to do with a vinyl record, right? So you might even have to have within a single catalog, multiple different types of layouts for posting the auctions, which is a very technical thing versus the different types of auctions just based on time reserve, no reserve, which is more about the features of the auction platform.
The last thing we'll talk about is how do you improve the eAuction tools, right? Where is my business intelligence coming from? How do—if Chris and I were running this auction platform—how do we make decisions for the business going forward the next three to five years? How do we grow the business? So one of the most important part and crucial elements of the platform is the analytics, right? If we have data, data tells us things. So the platform's got to be able to not only just capture the data, you want to have a module that's either an AI, a BI, or a machine learning module. So business intelligence, artificial intelligence, whatever it is, we want to be able to go in and have things like, "Hey, we noticed that these types of auctions typically run longer and we have more than X% of those auctions that people never buy and never close. What's the problem? How do we help our sellers do that? Because partly how we make our money is we take a small cut of each auction if that's how our auction runs, right?"
If there's a problem with the technical layout or the information or the experience that users are having that's causing them to leave, and it's not the items, then how do we know? If it is the items? Are we not showcasing them correctly? Do we not have large enough pictures? Do we not have the rating of the memorabilia? So that the most important elements that they need to know, people are having to just type that manually into their descriptions. And so the buyers can't find and filter on that.
What if I wanted to buy any sports cards, but I wanted ratings only of 9.0 and better? Well, then that needs to be a part of the filters when I go into sports memorabilia, because that's how I buy. And if you manually force them to type that into the description, I don't have time to go look through 10,000 auctions through every single one to find a card that I want to buy. So I'm going to go elsewhere because I buy in lot. It's something that I buy a lot of. What do you say about analytics? Because I think that's probably one of the most important features, if not the most important.