CHRIS: That's a great point. And this is something that we've seen whenever we get to a point with clients where they're collecting a lot of revenue. And this matters at scale. And frankly, whenever you get to the even 3% to 4%, that begins to matter pretty quickly. It certainly matters for the end-user too, they're going to need to know if they're going to be paying extra fees, and it needs to be very visible to them.
If you just look at it technically, a lot of the payment hub providers, they may not offer these options, or have these options with terms that are favorable. So there may be a favorable set of terms for one of these options, like paying via credit card and paying via a debit card. So we get an optimized payment provider in the eAuction software for that, and then we probably will end up recommending a slew or myriad of different payment providers for an escrow type of model that are separate from the credit card and debit card payment provider.
So how do you seamlessly integrate that? Putting that into the checkout process, into the actual “you've won the bid, now you need to actually make a payment” workflow. Really, it ought to be seamless for the end-user. They see a nice visual, very intuitive UI, using icons to our advantage, taking advantage of industry best practices for what different icons typically mean and brief text description. Then like more detail as needed. But behind the scenes, and deep inside of the actual eCommerce platform, there's a lot of nuance to getting some of these different models to work.
Like you were talking about, Ron, once we process a payment with multiple different payment providers—let's say there's one for debit and one for credit card, one for check-based payment, and then one for escrow payments—we may also have additional payment providers for different countries. Because, depending on the payment provider, they may not serve all countries.
We can wire all of this together behind the scenes using a modular capability of an auction platform, like the Clarity eAuction platform, but then you also have all of the integration to the back office. So how are we then taking that and drilling into that data and pushing it out to the sellers so they have what they need to operate their accounting? And similarly, for your business as a whole, for your eAuction company, integrating that back to your ERP system or accounting software.
These are all key considerations for payment solutions on all types of auctions. And frankly, one of the biggest challenges that can happen here is— whenever something doesn't go through properly, maybe there's a refund or somebody wants to process something with a wallet or reuse payment information, et cetera, any of these types of scenarios—you're going to want to think through all the edge cases with each of the different payment gateways or payment providers, and consider all of the nuances of these as well.
We typically go through all of this in discovery when dealing with an eAuction platform, right, Ron? And it's fascinating how much detail you can get into quickly. The magic here is picking and choosing based on what's best for the business and being able to prioritize so that we get the highest payoff or the lowest upfront costs.