CHRIS: But one of the big things about eAuctions is getting people who are qualified and interested to join the auction. And for B2B, this can be somewhat more challenging, because the total addressable market can be somewhat smaller. Notifications, therefore, are exponentially more important depending on your space. So it's really important that we have the ability to send out great notifications. One’s that don't get stuck in junk, that are going to get to the right person and at the right frequency, so they don't just ignore them.
You know, the other thing, though, Ron, is whenever they're actually putting the bid in, whenever they're going through the auction and they're putting a bid in, and maybe they've lost the top bid position. Or maybe the seller is running reverse auctions or a certain type of auction that requires sellers to lower their cost during the bid. We need to make sure that these are timely notifications based on the scenario.
If it's a certain criterion—like it's an auction they're really interested in, or a particular item that they think is going to sell out quickly and they're very serious about it—they need to be able to get escalated notifications if they want. This would include, mechanically, being able to receive text notifications for certain types of notifications, but not everything. Being able to have a B2B eCommerce mobile app or a tablet app or a desktop notification tool in addition to email and through the site itself.
So there are a lot of mechanical pieces of the notifications that are important to reverse auction websites, but it also goes to the actual fulfillment process, too. You know, we want to make sure that our governance is enforced on the site, so notifications are really important. Ron, I'm curious if you want to elaborate on any of those or go into more detail on any of them.
RON: I remember back when I was in IT at WordPerfect. I mean, we had 5500 employees, right? So you can imagine just the sheer number of cubicles we had for all the support. WordPerfect, back in the day, was famous for their tech support, and there were a billion cubicles. We would buy warehouses, and we would be watching these auctions. As businesses would go out of business or get acquired or move, they would sell off their furniture.
And we had one specific—and I don't remember what it is now, it's been so long—but there was this one specific brand of cubicles, so we were always watching for those. And every time a business cleared out, we swooped in and bought all their cubicles. And so in IT we would go buzz over these warehouses and see just dozens and thousands of parts and bits and stuff, and we'd have to pull them all apart, get the parts and organize them all, set them up.
It was funny because it was how much does it cost when teams would come and say, “Hey, I want to move, I'm growing my team.” They would come to us and we would have costs and say, “Well, if you move a team of X, it would cost half a million if you move a team to X, it was a million.” And we had these numbers down to where it was magical, but we could literally buy half a million dollars' worth of furniture for 20 to 50 grand on a marketplace auction site. And so I remember our business completely changing, and we bought all these warehouses, and we would buy just buy everything up and clear them out.
Sometimes we'd have to take a whole lot. There'd be a whole bunch of stuff we didn't want that we would just turn around and donate or resell, just because we were looking for very specific cubicle things that we could buy for pennies on the dollar. So being able to be notified of that [is vital].
But like you said, the issue is really volume. An eAuction platform like eBay, you've got thousands of people seeing that. But with B2B, it's businesses that are buying, and there's a heck of a lot fewer businesses than there are people. So a lot of the notification is also the proactive, notifying people of auctions coming up. And I know on a previous auction, we talked about it and we called it “Scouts.” That was where you can go out and say, “I'm looking for...”—and I'll bring a picture of [a very specific Scout] up on the screen here—in production it is called the Trailer Scout.