Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen discuss non-standard fulfillment options for B2B eAuctions, including intermodal freight.

Part 4 of a 7-part series (Return to Part 3)

RON: Let's move forward and talk a little bit about some of the other fulfillment options. Fulfillment for B2B, especially, can be a big deal. Even the WordPerfect example [I mentioned], where we’d buy an entire warehouse full of stuff, right, government auctions, B2B auctions, and things like that. So, depending on the types of items, these can be either expensive, complex or other things. 

I think you mentioned the word intermodal on a previous webinar, but we never really dove into that. One of the things that I'd like to talk about is the logistics of being able to deal with an estimate shipping. But then I've got a lot of information, I did some research specifically for this conversation right here, about the costs of B2B Commerce insurance and how to insure this stuff and how to deal with that because there's limits. So why don't you talk about the logistics and the integration of those and estimates, and then I'll talk a little bit about the costs in the insurance. 

CHRIS: Okay, that sounds great. And this is a really deep topic. So we're going to end up hitting on this in other discussions. And we'll certainly go into more tangential specifics in future segments. But the high level for B2B eAcutions is that fulfillment is one of the classic challenges that a B2B scenario deals with. 

If you think about it, this tends to be because the items are complex or there's a large quantity. There could be, like, what you were talking about, to run like international eCommerce shipping with customs and duties. And there could also be nuances where it's literally trying to fill up a container, so we may need to coordinate between multiple sellers so that their items can arrive and they can fill up a container that's going to an individual buyer, for example. These are relatively complex scenarios.

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CHRIS: It could also be something like an expensive item like an eauction platform for jewelry, or it could be a physical property. And these processes for fulfillment require a different form of execution that involves security or a detailed legal title transfer and these things. So fundamentally, there's a lot of detail here. 

I would say the biggest thing that we're going to be looking at is, number one, managing the expectations for both the seller and the buyer upfront for each eAuction. So we want to be able to define these things during the discovery with your team and then make sure that we're clearly representing that to the user, in as concise but complete a way as possible. 

This is an optimal thing for user experience and user interface design on a custom auction website, to be able to show icons, to have expanding and collapsing or rollover, tooltips, and really just walk someone through how this goes but have a path that they should end up following. Fundamentally, during the completion of the auction and winning the auction, it's really helpful to show the different types of auction categories of products and the fulfillment steps that they ought to expect. So, if we are selling large, expensive items, then during the checkout process or submitting the funds, we want to go through and show them different options for fulfillment.  

None of this should be a surprise. This should be something that, based on the different auction type that you're running, they have information up front. And we even have a prerequisite requiring them to sign off that they understand that.  

I think, Ron, this is one of the most challenging pieces during auction website development, if you don't do this upfront, is trying to go back and adjust someone's expectations. They need to know that the shipping might be more expensive in some cases, or a significant expense relative to the actual purchase itself, if the timeline for the fulfillment is going to be very significant. This is what we do all day long. This is our bread and butter. We encourage you to work with an online auction platform development company that does this, that works with 3PL organizations and can automate the shipping, estimating, and help provide multiple quotes from multiple LTL, freight, or intermodal shipments. It could be HAZMAT or sensitive items, or possibly really highly secure items, or the list goes on. 

Ultimately, Ron, this is where we play is in this auction marketplace space that's “relatively complex” to “extremely complex,” dealing with customs, duties, and insurance. And I would love it if you would talk about some of the nuance around the eCommerce insurance and the customs and duties pieces as well. Expecially when it comes to how to run an online auction.

Continue to Part 5 to learn about insurance for expensive items.