RON: So let's talk about the data itself and bringing the data over. You've talked about the team. And we wanted to heavily articulate, even if you select a team—we'll just use Clarity for right now—you saw a really cool demo of the Clarity eAuction platform, and you want to go with us. Of course, Clarity knows the Clarity platform, but does Clarity know the hundred other platforms you may be migrating from?
Being data migration specialists, because we've converted and moved clients from every eCommerce platform in the world and from disparate and proprietary platforms in the world to our eCom platform, we already have that background. So no matter what platform the data is in, we're very comfortable even when the data, like you said, doesn't have the foreign keys. I mean, when I'm working with clients on their product data, more than 95% fall in that dirty data category. They have their data, it took many, many years to get their data so it's even working in their current eCom platform of their current auction platform, but it got there from 45 different data sources.
So now when it's time to pack up and move it to us, they either have those same 45 data sources and it's all disjointed and not normalized—that's really the big one, most of the data is never normalized. But we need to be able to get access to that data, like you said, either through an endpoint API, or we can call and extract the data through some database for eCommerce. We can go in and run queries and export the data, but it’s also dependent on how structured that data...where it is...that helps us pull it over.
We've had a handful—fortunately not a lot—but we've had a handful of clients that have ditched their last online auction eCommerce platform before they came to us, and then we didn't have access to their old platform. They were paying $18,000 a month [to someone else] for hosting, and they didn't want to pay that. And so we were literally just starting to go look at the data and migrate the data—we hadn't even pulled any data yet—and they turned around and stopped paying, and that client didn't have a backup and they lost all their data.
It was bad, so make sure that, when you work with the vendor, you persist and maintain whatever relationship you have with your prior eAuction platform and/or vendor to give your new vendor time to get access, to get the structure to read, see what you're doing, fully understand and document, and then back up and get the data out so that they've got the data to be able to move to the new platform before you make any rash decisions.