ENGLISH AUCTIONS
RON: Let's talk about English auctions, it's one of the most common types of auctions, and it's a live auction that opposite of what you'll need with reverse auction software. I don't know if you guys, like me, are into cars with Barrett-Jackson. But I've been to Barrett-Jackson in person out in Scottsdale, but yet on the phone, they always have these phone bidders. And they're broadcasting it live on TV. So there are live bidders at the same time you're sitting in the chair and have a helper, and you're raising in the auction.
That's a traditional English auction, and it's a live online auction. The starting place can be zero or the starting place can be greater than zero. Again, with the car auctions, when they're selling the Ferraris that are going to ultimately sell for $2 million, they usually start out making a comment like, “Who wants to put me in? Should we start off at 500,000?” They don't want to start at zero and take 20 minutes, right? So they always go, “Should we start at 500,000?” OK, I've got 500,000 here in the front, and then off they go, and it's ascending bids.
They might even require an incremental bid size. I don't know if you guys have been on eBay eAuction software, but every once in a while when you go bid on eBay and you've been out bid, it'll tell you have to bid at least another dollar over, another 50% over or something like that. So sometimes there could be a requirement on the bid size.
There could be a time limit, but there's almost always a cutoff time. So usually on those B2B auctions, it's always like 30 seconds on the block. That's it. I mean, when they're trying to get through a thousand cars, if they go much over 30 seconds for each car, it throws the entire time off. And it's just a ripple effect, right? It's like the doctor's office. Every time you go to the doctor's office, it seems like there's a wait and you don't understand why there's a wait. When I have an appointment time and somebody takes longer and their appointment upfront early in the day and it just ripples everybody else's appointment through the rest of the day.
But anyway, the traditional thing is, the highest bidder then wins the B2B auction. It doesn't necessarily work for every scenario, especially when you get into real estate sealed bids, silent bids, things like that. But you have to make sure you have a lot of governance, too, because when you win an auction—I mean, I had a scenario just last week where I went in, put in a max bid, I won an eAuction. And because it was a used item and it was an as-is auction, the seller is required to sell it to me and send it to me now that I've paid for it. So I won the auction, I paid for it. They had eight or nine pictures of the item. So it was exactly in the condition I wanted.