RON: Right. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And a lot of people think notifications are simple things like notifications about my bid. But notification can be, “Hey, a potential buyer is asking you a question and if you don't get back to them very quickly with a response they're going to drop out, not bid.” So notifications might be a seller has a question, or the seller has a question about shipping. They're not going to buy something if they don't know how it can be shipped over to the UK. And now your global buyers are out because they can't get a hold of you.
So we talked about the scout. Remember you mentioned the scouts a couple of webinars back, where investors might be out of town, but they might go on the online bidding system and say, “I want to be notified if anything comes up that's liquidation of tools, or if any investment properties come up, I need to be notified.”
So a notification can be about things that haven't even started yet, have nothing to do with auctions. It has to do with searches and potential types of auctions that are going to be scheduled for future use.
CHRIS: That's right. And one of the things that I find so annoying about a certain eAuction platform is whenever I sign up for notifications and it just spams me constantly. And that is something that, by making the notifications configurable—and this is a really important point for folks who are listening—if you don't make the notifications highly configurable, you will be spamming a lot of your users. That's just what ends up happening in a lot of aution program software.
So we want to tell you very directly whenever you're looking to set this up, please make sure that whoever you're working with has the ability to turn these notifications on and off and change the frequency, and what the rules are so that the user can actually apply those settings if they choose to.
A lot of times they won't. A lot of times a user wants the aution system to be opinionated and intelligent, and we are going to work with them and recommend certain settings based on what's best practice within the industry. Nonetheless, though, there is always room for optimization. And one of the things that we want to make sure that the end-user has, so they have a really awesome experience, is control and the ability to essentially self-direct those notifications and how often they get them.
These would be things like “notify me immediately,” “accumulate all the notifications into a daily notification,” “only notify me weekly except for these things,” and, “notify me right away if it's this.” These are the type of settings that we're talking about when we say, “make them configurable.” But like you said, Ron, there are so many different aspects of the global auction platform that different bidders and sellers might be particularly interested in.
You can really get into the weeds here, can't you? And you can have sellers getting notified about other auctions on your online bidding system that are going on so they can see where an eAuction was finished, and then go list theirs right away because there were so many people that lost. Maybe they want the same thing. You can have groups of people that have a favorited item. Maybe it didn't they didn't win the bid and they didn't get the auction. So they may want to be notified of everything that matches their favorites.
The list goes on and on. And you can think of all kinds of permutations here. One of the most powerful things in marketing today is email and being able to use text and notify people who have already opted in. That is one of your most powerful tools. And if you think about it, it's literally a limitless marketing avenue that you can take advantage of, and it doesn't technically cost you per eAuction transaction. So this is a really powerful area, but we want to make sure that we don't abuse it.