RON: That makes sense. Well thanks, Chris. I appreciate you diving into those. Yeah. And you're right about that. It's kind of funny. Sometimes people think like, "Well, if I just build the site, it's going to bring the buyers or the sellers are just going to come and show up and use our B2B payments platform and we're going to make all this money," but they kind of forget sometimes that when you build the platform, it's literally your responsibility to bring both parties, right? It's not just like I'm going to stand a website and become the next eBay. If I build an auction site, I have to worry about SEO. I have to worry about CRO. Is the auction easy? I don't know if you've ever used Craigslist, but every time I'm forced to use Craigslist I think, "Good grief. This is like the least friendly, least automated self-service side I've ever used before."
And yet I've sold dozens of things on eBay and those sites don't even compare. And that's kind of how you have to think about when you build this site. It's not only the advertising kind of the SEO and bringing people, but you've got to have the site that when the buyers come, and I love the scout example you just gave. When a buyer comes and doesn't find something, do they leave and not come back forever? Or do you have this scouting availability where you can say, "Well today I can't see any sports memorabilia cards of a 9.8 and above. I'm looking for the perfect cards," or "I'm an investor in California and I love that Austin's market is heating up. So I want to look for all properties, 2000 to 2,400 square feet on at least a quarter acre between 400 and 500 grand. If any properties pop up, I want to be notified so I can bid on those."
I mean, we're talking millions of dollars of business you could bring to your site with one simple scouting feature. So things like that are really important. I'm going to go back to the more basic type features, and obviously the first one is the ability to make a purchase, right? Just the fact that I can go in and buy something. So now I think it was, gosh, if I remember back maybe 2015 when I started in the analytics scene that phone purchases and mobile purchases online were surpassing desktop. So you think about that, your eCommerce auction platform obviously has to be mobile responsive so people can be, and you just brought it up about being notified via email or text or however. So you've got more than half your audience now easily on their phone, looking at your site, being notified, notified that their bids has been surpassed, potentially buying.
So now all of the sudden, purchasing may not be just as simple as credit card. You mentioned escrow payments, especially for dealing with eCommerce shipping internationally or significantly large purchases for equipment and jewelry and things like that and maybe real estate. So now all of the sudden we're dealing with escrow payments, credit card payments, PayPal payments, but then you've also got mobile. So now do we have to have Stripe? What about Apple Pay? What about Google Pay? What about all the other things that we might need to deal with? So just accepting payments can be very complex. So make sure when you're looking for a platform, that it allows for the different types of payments.
Chris was talking about shipping. I know when I used to buy on eBay a number of years back, it felt like all of them were just flat $6.95 shipping, but I also purchased an item from Japan and started purchasing some things internationally. I just picked up and had something from the UK shipped last month. So I'm constantly dealing with things internationally.
So as you start looking at the platform, shipping might have to be international. Now payments. Okay. So if your payments are international, they might be wanting to see what the price is in their local currency. So are you're going to offer purchases in the local currency and then are you going to have your platform, when you do this backend integration and Chris, I'm going to ping you here in a minute, let you start talking about some of this integration work that needs to be done on the backend for this. Not only the logistics like 3PL and escrow companies and LTL shipping companies, but maybe in some of these and some of these multi-currency eCommerce APIs so that someone could place an order.
Maybe they want to see the order in French and they might just be in Quebec. But they want to see the eAuction site in French, they want to pay in Canadian dollars, but our backend, let's say we're only using QuickBooks on the backend. Now we're integrated with QuickBooks. I don't want that order placed into QuickBooks in Canadian dollars. I need it in US currency. So where and how do you typically see these conversions, these currency conversions, take place?
CHRIS: Yeah. Great question. And this is a really big challenge as companies scale and grow that you want to be thinking about. And basically the answer is there is a great solution here. We typically will do, depending on the business itself, we'll typically kind of handle this in several different places. This can be handled with the payment hub solution, the B2B payment gateway. Some different payment gateways will allow us to have several different accounts for different currencies essentially. Most commonly it makes sense to actually show the conversion upfront to the user and then actually complete the conversion kind of before it's actually getting into the ERP, the CRM, or whatever back office system you're using. Hopefully it's an ERP. Once you get to scale it typically will be. But the idea would be that usually you're going to do that conversion kind of before it gets through B2B payment processing. We can show live conversion rates of the currency.
We have the ability to integrate, like we said, with the different payment gateways. In many different countries or for many different currencies, there are just a few payment gateways that really are the dominant payment gateways. A lot of the major payment gateways that folks are used to, they don't actually service all of the currencies or all of the regions. So there's a lot of nuance to that, that we essentially want you to know that we've dealt with this literally in dozens and dozens of different countries.
Some of our clients literally work in over 100 countries and we've helped them execute on the currency conversion, the actual language side of things, and there's a lot of nuance to it. I won't go into all the detail, but we absolutely are comfortable helping you with that and analyzing that process. A very good point, Ron, especially as we do drive around the analytics and the marketing, we're going to be working to help you scale and this is going to be a very good problem that we'll be able to help work on with you as you scale your business.
RON: I like that. Yeah. And I don't know if you're a car guy like I am, but I love to watch the South Bees and I've been out to Barrett Jackson and I've driven a car across the block. So I'm really into the car auctions, and if you've ever see them on TV, a lot of times as they're bidding, they have a lot of foam bidders that bid in and you look up on the screen and they'll have British Pounds, Euros, and [American] dollars all at the exact same time because they'll have literally people calling from Europe bidding on a custom Ferrari or something like that. So while somebody's in the audience raising their hand bidding in US dollars, you've got multiple people around the world on the phone bidding in different currencies all at the same time. And like you said, being able to have that conversion live on the screen allows them to all do that at the same time.
And so if your auction needs to do that, then you need to have live API integrations that can pull those conversion rates on the screen so that the guy in Canada can be looking at it in Canadian dollars while I'm down here in Texas looking in US dollars and somebody's over in the EU looking at it in Euros, and they're all bidding on that auction. So again, it depends on your reach.
So let's kind of move into the catalog because that's really where all that features exposed. So within that catalog, it's got to be robust, right? It's got to be able to handle. And we talked about this in the overview, but if you didn't attend the overview webinar, go back. It's a great opening webinar. We covered a lot of information in there, but one of the things we were really talking about distinguishing between were if you had like a real estate property versus sports memorabilia, right?
The attributes and the information that I would be looking at would be completely different for the property. You'd have to be thinking like Zillow. If I'm looking at a property and I'm moving my family to Austin, Texas, I want to know about the schools and about property tax and is it within walking distance of a park? Is there a pool nearby? All that kind of stuff. But if I'm looking at sports memorabilia, really all I want to know is it PSA rated and what's the condition and then some really good pictures and that's all I really care about. And so we were talking about, in that robust catalog, having the ability to have different product or, at that time we called it different eAuction templates. So each type of auction might have a completely different layout, a completely different workflow, a completely different set of attributes.
So the catalog would have to be not only robust at the catalog level, but at the auction-creation level. So if I was a listing agent and I wanted to list a property up there, then obviously when I create that auction, I would have to have all of those attributes and all of those fields prompting me to put in the lat and long of the property. I mean, you've been to Zillow. There's like 40 pictures of every property, right? So it'd have to prompt me to put in all the relevant information that would help drive and create a successful real estate auction versus if I was uploading a Pokemon card, I probably need four or five pictures, a PSA rating condition, and a short description and I don't need anything else. How I want to ship the card, right?
Other than that, I really don't need anything. So that's a completely different type of eAuction solution that could be set up in just a matter of minutes compared to listing for real estate property, which might take me half an hour to fill out properly. So the catalog has to be robust in that way. The catalog, like we talked about a minute ago, about those scouts, the catalog's got to be able to have all kinds of different filters because if I go to Zillow, my filters are like, "Oh, I'm only looking for four bedroom, three bath, within this school district," and things like that. But if I'm looking for sports memorabilia, those filters are completely different. So it has to be robust enough that within a handful of clicks I can get into and find the appropriate options I'm looking for. So very intuitive and easy to use navigation. Great layout, great filters, both on page and within the category structure of the navigation. Make sure that you can have both dependent and non-dependent categories, dependent and non-dependent filters.