Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) explain penny auctions and Dutch auctions.

Part 4 of an 8-part series (Return to Part 3)

PENNY AUCTIONS

RON: The next type is a penny auction website. Penny auctions are interesting because, if you don't understand them, you'll see those things like, “Hey, I got my MacBook Pro and only paid $12.83,” and you're like, “Oh my gosh, I can go in there and do that.” That's great.  

What they do in a penny auction is, they come up with a fee, and that fee is charged per bid. So very much like a raffle, right? I might win a $50,000 car, but at five bucks a pop, I spend$ 50, I get ten shots at winning that car. Yes, I may have won that car for $50 and it's a $50,000 car, but there were a thousand people that paid $50 or there were 10,000 people that paid $50 and they made $500,000 to sell and ship a $50,000 car. 

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RON: It's the same thing with the penny auction on a custom auction website. For example, if there were 100 people bidding on that laptop and a hundred people each bid ten bids to try to win because there's a frenzy going on because it's only going up a penny apiece, you're like, “Heck, I'll bid $0.53, $0.54. I'm only buying it for $0.54. What a great deal,” right? So you're just bidding and bidding and bidding and you got 100 people going crazy and it sells for $12.83 that could be potentially a penny apiece. It's 1200 and 83 bids. And if each of those bids cost a dollar, many auction sites charge $2, then they made either $183 just on the bids and then another twelve, eight, $12.83 for whoever won it. They had to pay that as well. So you have to think about those.  

That's a great way to drive a lot of interest, because people like an eCommerce auction, you're like, “Heck yeah, I'll pay $20 to potentially win a $50,000 Corvette." That's exactly that same concept. So it's a fairly telling model and it works well for certain businesses and certain items. 

If you have a business like an Overstock.com where you can get overstock items, where you're picking up old, refurbished MacBooks that typically sell for $1500 bucks, you can put it on a penny auction and say, “Win this for pennies on the dollar,” and drive a lot of traffic to eAuction sites, that could be something that might be interesting. 

It's really important to marry the number of goods with the auctions and the number of users that can be on the eAuction platform to bid on them, because that's really where you're making the money. You have to make sure you've got a lot of bidders each willing to bid, and then that creates the frenzy. Because if you have 300, 400, 500 people bidding on a $2,000 laptop, hoping to get it for $12, then it makes a big difference. When a thousand people each bid $20, there's $20,000. That's crazy, right, for a $2,000 laptop. So anyway, that's penny auctions.

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DUTCH AUCTIONS

RON: The next one would be what we call a Dutch auction. I'm sure everybody's heard of this auction. It's often used for a B2B auction, but it can be used anywhere. This is where the price is descending—and it's funny, because this is where a lot of the car auctions go, where the really high-end car auctions are. Like I said before, if somebody wants to start me off at $500,000 and then they'll get some, “Okay, $500,600,” and then it just starts going up, right? That's the English online auction.  

A Dutch reverse auction might come in—and this is typically how I've seen a lot of the auctions start—and they'll say they'll start it. Let's say the car is going to go for about 35 grand, though, right? Who's going to pay me? 50, 50, 50? Do I have 50? All right, how about 40? Anybody at 40? Anybody, 30. Anybody at 20? OK, ten. Somebody put me in 10. OK, great.  

Now I have 10 at the front and then it turns into an English auction that starts going back up. So the bids on Dutch reverse auction websites start high, even with keyword bidding, and as the price comes down, whoever's willing to buy at that certain price, they win. And so that's the difference between that and the car auction. The car auction doesn't come in where they start high, they start going, who's going to pay 50? And it drops down to ten and then it goes back up. 

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RON: The Dutch auction is, who wants to pay 20,000 for this car? 15,000. Then somebody comes in at 13, he goes, I'll pay 13. That's it. The eAuction’s done on a Dutch auction and they win. So the price starts high and then it starts coming down in increments and whoever blinks first, wins. Dutch B2B mobile auction are becoming increasingly popular.

Continue to Part 5 to learn more about Janapese reverse auctions.