RON: Now, there's a heck of a lot more than that because you don't have to use CORS you don't have to do that. You can literally access the platform in the API directly. And that's what I want you to talk about, because that's where most of some of the other channels might come in that may not be able to simply just embed and display some of those elements.
CHRIS: Yeah, that's exactly right. The explanation of CORS I just want to hit on, just bringing it home for the listeners that have an auction platform. What this means is you can literally have an embeddable component from the marketplace that we build with you or that you build with another partner that does this. You can literally offer everyone who's holding an auction the ability to take a snippet of code that they don't have to know any software development. They can copy that code and drop it into their site
Of course, you've probably seen this with iframes and Google Maps and things like this. But we're talking about a more immersive opportunity with using CORS and using headless eCommerce solutions. So it can be much more of a rich experience that they can incorporate into their site. The beauty here is that we can calibrate the level of the delta that that experience is presented, and it can be a simple block of code that they paste in just like you would with a YouTube video or Google Maps. Or it can be something more robust where it's—like you were talking about, Ron—it's taking advantage of these APIs and these endpoints.
The really cool thing for most auctions, there is some form of needing to upload and input different types of auctions into the system. And this can be quite a challenge, especially at scale if everything has to happen through the site itself. So typically, we're going to at minimum want to be able to take advantage of leveraging mobile and tablet applications, especially have native capabilities with the camera and video and things like this, being able to leverage those tools, even barcode scanning, just some of those basic things that we want to incorporate, make it easier for the user.
An example would be they can barcode scan something if it has a SKU, then it will attempt to auto-populate the description and the content, and then they can take a picture, and if this makes sense for your particular scenario, it will go ahead and put the geocode information on there so we can see that it's a legit picture and verify that, there are some things that we can do around this anyway.
Anyway, long story short, the beauty here is that all of this, whenever we're using headless eCommerce platforms, is the data is going to push into the same database that's being used to present the site. So, without having to change anything on the back end, without having to add extra pieces, we can build a mobile and tablet application. We can also do things like build a specific use case scenario, maybe for a particular category, so we can have another site, that’s maybe just a simple site that's based on WordPress.
And that that site is just for a particular segment of, let's say, real estate in a particular market, and it's a wholesale real estate purchasing group. So maybe your business is selling homes online, but now you want to go after wholesale real estate and maybe sell to institutional investors for a particular set of regions, and you just want a simple site that speaks to them. Well, what would it be like to then just easily leverage the investment that you've already made into a robust eCommerce platform for auctions and then basically parlay that into another niche focus that you can dominate?
That's really one of the major benefits of headless eCommerce software, is you literally can take this extremely powerful functionality, and this need for consistent data across your enterprise and deliver it in this precision format that's surgically delivered for a particular niche. So it's just a really powerful capability.
One of the other things that we see a lot with this is working with partners. So, you're at an event and you're networking, and you meet another auction platform group. And they say, “Man, it would be so awesome if we could get your auctions onto our system and help syndicate some of what you're doing. We would love to partner with you guys. It's not really overly competitive. And, maybe we could cross-function with promoting our auctions together.”
And so what do you do? Like, that sounds great, but what do you do mechanically to do that scale? Well, you want them to be able to access your data and restrict it to what part of that data you want them to have access to. So, you can do that with a headless eCommerce framework for auctions. Based on the user roles and, without getting into the detailed weeds, we can expose that data.
There are several other examples that I think we'll get into as we go. But I think the summary here, Ron, is that it's a powerful capability that you're going to want to think about as you're planning out your project so that you can continue to benefit from your investment in your platform long after that initial investment is done.