webinarsbreadcrumb separatoreauctions-chapter-5-part-1-security-performance-and-payment-types

Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) begin the webinar by discussing security, performance, and payment types for online eAuction platforms.

Part 1 of a 4-part series

RON: Hey, Chris. Ron here. How's it going today? 

CHRIS: Hi, Ron. Going great. I'm very excited to meet again and dive into eAuction payment features and get into the weeds on that today. 

what is hipaa

RON: Yeah, me too. Welcome, audience. This is the fifth in a series talking about a custom auction website. So if you didn’t catch the first four, you want to go back and visit those, and I'll link them here at the end of the video.  

So, Chris, why don't we jump right in. Today we're going to talk about securing and making a performance site and all the different types of payments that can happen on an eAuction site. What are your thoughts?

what is hipaa

CHRIS: Thanks, Ron. It's really detailed for auctions. It depends on what segment of the market you're in. Depending on the segment, you may be looking for a high number of transactions and high frequency, or you may be dealing with very large transactions and making sure that the eAuction participants are highly qualified. There really is a spectrum there, right? 

RON: Well, it's a term I've heard you use for years. It's high fidelity. EAuction sites that are selling multimillion-dollars Ferrari's are certainly going to be different from ones selling $20 Pokémon cards. There's a significant difference in fidelity. And, when you do an international payments like we were with goAfrica, even just the payment transactions are completely different. The level of trust, and how do you share millions of dollars securely across the world? Let's jump on in. 

CHRIS: OK, sounds great. 

what is hipaa

RON: The first thing we're going to talk about are the payment methods and the verification of payments on an eAuction platform. I just made a comment about sharing across the world, let's go ahead and dive into that a little bit. 

CHRIS: With international payments—just to set this up a little bit—one of the interesting challenges is that some of the actual vendors, some of the sellers, may not be trustworthy. That can be hard to hear, but that can be the reality. And there can be a high level of trust, but still mechanical frequency of mechanical failures or logistical issues that can still cause there to be some trust issues, even in high trust environments.  

So it's not necessarily bad to consider what the worst case is, and how can I make sure it's a great customer experience, notwithstanding that worst case? [GoAfrica] was an extreme of that, in that we knew going in that the actual sellers, that the folks conducting an auction, were not necessarily trustworthy. First of all, we put them through a process to vet and validate that their business was real, then go through a rating and review process for them.

what is hipaa

CHRIS: Additionally, whenever a buyer made a purchase and they were the one who won the bid on the B2B auction site, then they would have the ability to, as the buyer, put their funds into escrow as opposed to [the funds] going directly to the seller immediately. This is really powerful, because it behaviorally reinforced this logistical fulfillment process having to occur and having to occur successfully with the buyer receiving the items and accepting the items. 

The other part of the equation is with high-dollar, high-ticket value items. There can be key steps that need to happen with regards to contracts and agreements before the buyer even makes their first bid. This all goes into the equation with an escrow type of a payment right? So we want to make sure that expectations are managed before everyone gets to the table. 

For the sake of brevity today, lets make the assumption that those pieces are already in place whenever we're dealing with an escrow payment. But we will point out that that's an area we're happy to discuss and dive into in another video and in another discussion. But once someone has agreed to these terms—be it they're bidding on a house online, they're bidding on a classic vehicle, or maybe a very expensive piece of jewelry or art, maybe it's expensive machinery—these are all scenarios where they're probably going to be major ticket items and they need to have a good understanding. They need to be a sophisticated purchaser, essentially, of that category of purchase.  

We want to verify both the seller and the buyer, and then we want to make sure that there's a process for both of them to be able to go through steps that are enforced, so that when the buyer is going through their acceptance, they're actually a sophisticated buyer. They're not going to be denying the logistical delivery and the disbursement from the escrow to the seller because of some frivolous reason that isn't valid for that category of sales or type of auction.

what is hipaa

CHRIS: There are some really nice platforms that we've worked with and integrated into our core eAuction platform. One of them is called Pioneer. A lot of folks who do escrow work have probably heard of or worked with Payoneer integration. They're an excellent company that's grown a lot over the last five or six years. And fundamentally, this company has a lot of built-in international capabilities to execute on escrow. There are also other companies like escrow.com, the list goes on.  

But the bottom line here, Ron, is that, depending on your business model, you probably want to have a more sophisticated and more robust expectation management and signoff process up to the payment and up to the winning bidder and seller ,all understanding what the terms are and signing off and going through a formal process with workflows and notifications. And then once someone wins the bid and completes a deposit or an earnest payment or the full payment, there needs to be some capability around the capacity to verify along the way. So that's what escrow allows you to do really easily on an online eAuction platform. So what are your thoughts? 

RON: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, we had to do that with goAfrica, right? When we had Komatsu in Japan selling $3 million worth of [farming] combines to Kenya. Obviously, they want to make sure they get their $3 million, but Kenya wants to make sure that, if they're going to put up $3 million, they get the equipment they so desperately need. 

How do you do that securely? I've seen this on a smaller scale. I mean, I'm big into cars and I've been to Barrett-Jackson auctions. If you're going to go in and bid on those cars, you have to do pre-verification to say you've got X number of dollars in the bank before you're even allowed to bid. And then if you do bid on a car, you have to have all the funds secured, paid for within three days, and all kinds of stuff.  

It's definitely something that [goes on] behind the scenes on eCommerce auction platforms. You just need to make sure when you get a platform, a vendor like Clarity, that you can talk to that has uncovered [problems] and knows what all those intricacies are. Because you don't want to be held liable in the middle without providing those protections, right? 

Continue to Part 2 to learn about security on eAuction sites.

Recent Search

HIPAA Compliance AngularJS Web Development ERP Sage Integrations Microsoft Dynamics Xamarin Framework Comparison Essential Website Features

Top Searches

B2B Supply Chain Management WooCommerce Integrations Catalog Product Tags Top B2B eCommerce Challenges Epic Integrations Optimizing Mobile Apps