Chris Reddick (President and CEO at Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) discuss the importance of buyer/seller interactions on an eAuction platform.

Part 3 of a 4-part series (Return to Part 2)

RON: The last one here is really talking about the marketplace itself. Do you want to dive into how this is both super important? I mean, sheer volume, right? How many sellers are on Amazon? How many sellers are there on GoAfrica, that marketplace we did. We put hundreds of thousands of sellers in and millions of products. How important is communication when it comes to auction program software especially? 

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CHRIS: Yeah, great point. I mean, it fundamentally makes or breaks everything, doesn't it? And it really boils down to how much self-service and intelligent governance we can bake into the process. And notifications are where the governance really kind of gets executed in many cases. So notifying and keeping everyone apprised of what the rules are and what the best practices are.  

We're going to put bumpers, if you will, into our bowling alley. And instead of having gutters, we've got these bumpers there and we're just constantly adjusting and keeping everyone on track with these notifications. And it's such a powerful opportunity as an eAuction eCommerce platform provider to be able to deliver this governance to both the sellers and the buyers. And this is fundamentally what they're coming to you for. 

So if you take that opportunity to not just transactionally interact, but also to imbue this sense of kind of community and community standards within your auction platform, it really can help you to take it to the next level. 

RON: And this we keep saying the word notifications, but it really is true for all communication? I remember a platform we did a while back called Campus2Careers. You remember that. And it was a big, huge platform we did that was nationwide where it allowed all of the campuses and universities to publish and post openings for internships. And then it allowed anybody anywhere to go in and search for these internships and ask questions about the internships and engage. But the important thing about that was that the notifications and emails and messages all happened in the eAuction platform

And why was that true? Well, we didn't want professors sharing private emails with students and people getting private emails. Well, that's exactly the point I'm making here in this marketplace. You remember I talked about in a previous one that eBay auction that I got screwed out of that album a couple of weeks ago. Right. And I was mad, but I didn't want to leave them a bad review for fear that they would leave me a bad review over a $20 vinyl record. It just wasn't worth it to me, but the whole thing fell apart.  

And I think they're a cheat seller and something should have happened, but right now I can't reach out to them. I could go back to that seller, send a note and say, “Hey, why did you do this?” But nothing's going to come of it. But the most important thing is there can't be any repercussions for them and/or me because he or she doesn't know my private email. I don't know theirs. I can only communicate through the auction system platform itself.  

So it's established this whole level of security, almost a little bit of anonymity, right? But there's this additional level of security and trust that, if I went back and left them a bad review, the worst thing they could do is leave me a bad review in turn. They can't come after me. They can't charge after me. They can't stalk my Facebook. And so the platform itself, it's not only about the notifications, it's about establishing a secure communication platform across the whole thing. 

CHRIS: That's right. Exactly. 

RON: Let's move on now. The bid is done and now we're going to fulfill the product. So you want to go down through some of these fulfillment requirements after the eAuction, and where the notifications are. Different notifications can come from the surveys and the reviews and things like that afterwards, right? 

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CHRIS: That's right. So, someone wins the online eAuction, a lot of people don't. The first thing we want to do is notify everyone what the outcome was. And sometimes it's surprising, but, because the system is so self-service and automated in many ways for the bidding, sometimes people don't realize right away that they won the auction. So we want to let them know, hey, you actually won. Congratulations. And here's what's next.  

Really laying that out for them in a very clear way is absolutely critical. So the seller and the buyer have a great experience. In many cases with our clients, they're dealing with complex transactions. So this is not over yet. Fulfilling the item may be one of the most challenging aspects if we're dealing with real estate or we're dealing with expensive items or bulky items or complex shipping, customs and duties. 

The main thing with the notification from the auction system software, first of all, is to not just give them all the information and make it very compelling and share best practices, but it's also important to put timelines on things. Especially once we kind of get to this stage in the process, we want to make sure that the seller is getting the proper engagement from the buyer and vice versa. 

Just like the experience that you had with eBay, Ron, this is a similar situation for many of these large purchases. The seller is really sitting on inventory, if you will, and they really need this transaction to get finished. So the buyer needs to have a timeline to complete certain things buy or this is the failsafe, this is kind of the next step that's going to happen. 

The notifications really need to drive that behavior, both for the buyer and the seller. They need to be confirming that they are going through this process once the buyer wins the auction. And the seller needs to confirm that they're also actively engaged. Having timelines and being able to see that there's some kind of confirmation from both the buyer and the seller. So they're interacting, they're confirming. Normally this is going to be options that they click on inside of the notifications themselves. This will take the user back to the eAuction platform to interact. And then essentially there's a workflow here that we want to complete.  

Part of that workflow is going to be customizing it to the specific auction type. And, within your auction platform, you may have multiple auction types, you have multiple types of auctions that you're running. Each of those needs to be specific to that particular niche and to the workflows that are necessary to complete that process. What we want to do, working with you and your team, is just make sure that the shipping fulfillment, that any kind of escrow, any kind of proof of documentation, tracking information, et cetera, has a place to live in this process. 

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CHRIS: And again, whenever the seller is inputting, “Hey, we shipped the item, here's the tracking info.” The buyer wants to know about that right away. Nowadays, most people in society are relatively impatient to get this detail and information right away. As compared to twenty or forty years ago. And you want to factor that in.  

We really need to be in a position where the seller, whenever they are completing this process, can input the information and it has a place to live, and then the buyer's going to get that information. Same thing with the buyer; with some of these complex transactions, the buyer has a lot to do in order to conclude the online auction and actually complete the full transaction. 

They're going to be doing some complex things, and we need the seller to be able to see, yes, in fact, the buyer has completed this. A typical way that we'll do this is we'll show steps for both the buyer and the seller and we'll show who's responsible at what time. “So this is in the buyer's court. The seller is currently doing this, you can usually expect it to take this long. This is what we tell them is best practice. If it goes longer than that, feel free to contact them.”  

We basically want to be very opinionated about what is expected, communicate that to both the buyer and seller, and then show both buyer and seller where we are in the process. This is a really key part of the notification process. And fundamentally, it really, really helps to make sure that there's a high satisfaction for both buyers and sellers when engaging with the auction program software

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RON: Agreed. And this this could be part of the expensive part of the platform, because that third bullet there, where there needs to be a detailed process. Uou can imagine buying a piece of sports memorabilia, the process of getting that fulfilled and shipped is going to be completely different from a property. Because of earnest money and inspections and all kinds of things, that just takes time.  

And everybody expects that with a property but nobody expects that with a Pokémon card, do they? They expect not only fast food, it's now fast shipping and fast payment. Everything's fast. You said we're impatient and it's true, but it's because we've figured out in this age of technology, we've figured out how to do things fast.  

And when you go to online bidding platforms—and it's funny, the one thing my wife tells me this all the time, we joke around, she's like, “I don't shop online at this place anymore.” And I'm like,”Why?” And she said, “You spoiled me.” And I'm like, “How?” And she goes, “Well, you guys build websites and you've educated me on what a good website is and performance. Now every time I go to a bad website and the experience is crappy I'm just like, these guys have a bad process. They must be bad in business.”  

And she just leaves and she won't shop online anymore at these places because she's so critical of the online experience. And I experience that, too. It's kind of funny. 

CHRIS: It's a reflection of the underlying business, right? 

RON: It truly is. It was funny. It's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, she's one of the top 20 businesswomen in the world. She's a Harvard professor. She's published like 23 books. Brilliant, brilliant Woman. She did a test a while back with—I think it was with Harvard and Carnegie, I might be off on that—but she did a study a number of years ago and it said within the first 50 milliseconds of hitting a website, the person has already established a subconscious professionalism score for your business. 

So when people think design isn’t important, or when people come to an eCommerce auction and they try to see a picture of an item you're selling, you don't think it's important that you have a nice picture or a good description, you couldn't be more wrong. 

 

Communication Workflow is Key

Automating the workflow can reduce staffing costs and ensure the process you've put in place goes off without a hitch. Let us show you how to improve workflow to make buyers and sellers happy with you every time.

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Continue to Part 4 to find out more about the importance steps after an auction ends.