CHRIS: And this ties right into governance, doesn't it?
RON: Well, let's start there. Let's go in and talk about governance. We briefly talked about governance in the last chapter, Chapter 6 - Payment Types for eAuctions. To remind the folks, down in the description, I'm actually putting links to every chapter and a description of what each chapter is. So if Chris and I are talking about something, we're like, “go back and look at the chapter on omnichannel,” go down, look in the description. You can see that's Chapter 3, if I remember correctly. And there will be a link to that, too.
So, Chris, kick us off and explain governance and how governance specifically applies to auction sites.
CHRIS: Absolutely. One of the things that we want to think about with an auction site is being able to scale the auction site and operate the auction site autonomously as much as humanly possible for every portion of the workflow. And, for your particular eAuction process, you may have really specific industry or categories, nuances that apply.
Fundamentally, though, the governance is going to be, essentially, applying the business rules that you've figured out that allow for the most value to get to the sellers and the buyers. And from an overall value perspective, there's a lot that you can do by being opinionated about how the process goes for sellers and buyers alike.
This can be something that you're tuning and constantly refining, but ultimately, having an opinion and driving a process for those users, both the buyers and the sellers, can be several orders of magnitude, or think 10 to 100 to even 1000 multiplier on the results that you get for your business. And if you just let yourself think about that for a minute, 10 to 100. I mean, that alone is worth it. But you could even get 1000 times the results by putting the right governance in place.
Why is that? Well, if you're trying to scale your business and you're trying to scale your online auctions software and deliver value, most people nowadays, they're comparing all of the options that are out there. They're going to go with a commoditized offering that has great governance and has those things that—anyone going through your auction is going to say, “Oh, yeah, this would make sense to do, and this would make sense to have this, and it should really be like this.” That's governance.
This is something that, if you have to manually interact with the buyers or the sellers in order to drive that, then you're going to cause them a lot of frustration, because they're going to have to wait and have delays. They're not going to be able to self-service, essentially. And then you may also have scenarios where, just by not expressing an opinion through governance, you're creating a situation where the users have to figure it out. Again, this has a catch-all where there's some manual human interaction.
It's not that you can't do human interaction. It's just that you want to, wherever possible, allow the users to have self-service on your marketplace auction. So maybe they have the opportunity to self-service with an opinionated governance. But there's the ability to have a pressure release valve where they can progress to human interaction as needed.