CHRIS: And fundamentally, whenever it comes to a purchase for a buyer of an online auction, well, where do they actually begin the engagement? It's when they make a bid. So whenever they're bidding, we want to remind them. And if we see a pattern develop within the system itself, where maybe there are more issues with this type of bid or this size of a deal, maybe it's a larger auction value, et cetera, then we want to go ahead and put some extra workflow steps in there to pre-qualify or verify with the buyer that they actually understand what they're committing to.
These are really, really helpful governance steps that can help. And then, of course, once everything is done, once we have a winning bidder and we're going to be taking it offline to complete the transaction, it's helpful to have a sequence that's going to go out in an automated form that's intelligent, that matches each of the different payment processes and sets of rules.
This is rather a non-technical [explanation], but this is what makes or breaks these processes, having little reminders that go to the buyers and sellers on an auction website. Think about what they're dealing with. If you put yourself in their shoes, they're operating their own business, they may not have as many resources, or this particular person working as the seller may not have as many resources within their role to be able to completely focus on this. So we need to be able to concisely and clearly articulate to them, hey, you have a buyer, they bought your thing, now you need these steps to fulfill it. And, by the way, as a friendly reminder. Normally, if you respond and you confirm within an hour to 4 hours, that's going to leave the buyer feeling more satisfied. This is data that we've analyzed.”
That's just how it goes. The faster you respond and confirm that their process after an eAuction takes place, their purchase is being processed and moved into fulfillment, they're going to feel a sense of relief at knowing that and seeing that progression. Then, if you can provide the tracking info for their shipment within this time period, it's going to depend on your industry and how your particular space works and some of the nuances. Obviously, if it's an intermodal shipment, it's going to be somewhat challenging to get tracking information right away.
But the bottom line is, if you can coach—essentially with your governance—and send a sequence to the buyer and seller of what to expect once that payment process is started, that's also going to be extremely helpful.
I'll briefly touch on this and see if you want to chime in here. Then we have all the back-office systems too. So the buyer and seller engage. We send these automated steps, and they're completing the process depending on how complex the purchase is. It may be a multi-step process, including an escrow approval, et cetera. But then we also have the back-office side of it for the seller, dealing with that and dealing with taxes, maybe there are customs and duties, or just even if it's just all in the U.S., there are different taxes for different counties and different states. Sometimes it's just state tax, sometimes it's county specific.
This can get rather detailed for the seller. They're probably not going to have time to deal with all this. So we need to be able to deal with all of this in that payment process and try to automate this. And that's where having a robust eAuction platform really makes a difference, doesn't it?
RON: It's definitely something we've dealt with a million times with international [transactions]. I mean, things like GDPR, VAT, GST. When do you do that? Here in the U.S., [we have clients that] do a lot of business in quote-unquote, North America. And so now all of a sudden they've got purchases that are being done in Canada in Canadian dollars, but they're here fulfilling in the U.S. They're shipping across country lines, and they don't want us to take those transactions in Canadian dollars in their ERP. So we're integrating live multicurrency conversion APIs midstream, where we're literally passing events, auctions, sales, parsing that, converting into U.S. dollars before pumping it into the ERP. So that accounting here in the U.S. can deal with it just in American dollars. They know exactly what they actually collected, because it was collected originally in Canadian dollars, thanks to the eAuction software.
But obviously the purchaser wanted to be able to see it in Canadian dollars because that's what they do every day. I dealt with this last week. I bought—and I think I told you this earlier today when we were talking—I’m big into the classic rock vinyl records, right? So I went out and I bid on three records last week. I won two of them. And within an hour of winning the auction, I already had an email saying, “Okay, you have 24 hours to pay for that.” And then when I paid for it, there's another notification that goes to the seller that says, “You now have 72 hours to ship this.” And so, like you just said, the online auction software literally walked through the reminders, and I experienced that last week.