RON: You can also do some other things, like FactorTrust would go in and, as you signed up, it could validate your job, it could validate your address. If you put your home address, it could validate whether you're the one that's on the lease or on the mortgage. It could validate a bank. You could put your bank credentials in there, could validate your bank, and it could come back and give you the equivalent of a credit score. But they call it a “trust score” and it doesn't actually hit your credit. There are third-party eCommerce APIs for that.
There's third-party APIs we talked about in a previous chapter when we talked about escrow. There's different payment hub forms where, with Payoneer or escrow.com where funds can be uploaded into escrow and released. It's almost like, as a development shop, we talk about milestones. Well, your process has different milestone. One milestone, the first milestone, is getting verified to bid. The next milestone might be winning the eAuction. The next milestone might be your earnest money, and the next milestone might be getting through the inspection. And then the next one might be the delivery of the goods, or the shipment of the goods. And so certain funds are released on shipment before you're going to ship.
You want to make sure that—let's say it was $1,000,000 piece of jewelry, you want to make sure that you've received $250,000 before you even shipped the item to know that they've got the money. So those funds are released, and then when it's shipped—even if it's a partial shipment—and it's received, do they just take it and run? Or do you have another governance process that says it's received by a third party in the city where they have to drive and pick it up upon signature and put in their ID? And so this third party receives it, does an inspection, and they're the ones that say, “Yes, it is in the condition that it was. It's done, it's approved.” And as soon as they come and look at it, if they take the item, then that third party puts in that the funds are released to the seller to try to protect everybody.
So you have to think through the entire scenario of the different things that you're doing. And there might be different APIs that are needed for the different types of auctions and the verification process.
CHRIS: Exactly. One of the interesting things about just, for example, escrow-based payments, is there are a lot of different vendors. We've worked with Payoneer, companies like Escrow, you have Trust, Rapid, Paybase, and the list goes on of vendors we've added during auction website development. So how are you going to select between these different vendors, and what are some of the questions that you're going to ask in order to determine what makes sense for your particular business? This is something that we recommend.
Ultimately, you get into the details and understand the transactional cost. A lot of escrow-based payments, for example, can be quite expensive. They charge a premium to deal with this escrow type of model. So does it make sense to do that, or does it make sense to have a workflow in the auction software that you run internally and essentially set up some internal escrow model?