CHRIS: It's a really great question. And the reality is the seller may need to be willing to make adjustments on the fly to maximize the auction. They may need to adjust that minimum reserve down in order to keep the bidders engaged. And it really depends on the type of online auction that we're running.
But fundamentally, we may end up needing to kind of coach both the seller and the buyer through what this auction is supposed to look like and sort of based on what's happening with the auction, send notifications to the seller and essentially say, “Hey, look, if you move this minimum reserve down,” or, "Here's some common recommendations for auctions like yours, if you do this, in some cases we've seen this.” That might help them maximize their actual auction as opposed to leaving a really high reserve amount. And then no one engages.
RON: You see that live eCommerce auctions a lot, right? You watch it and you hear them in the room yell, “reserve is off.” And sometimes it's like, oh, wow, a frenzy is going to happen. And it does. And other times it's like not one more bit and it just closes. So you never know what it does. But obviously the thought is, let's think through this and best practices says that 63% of the time, taking the reserve off when there's a bunch of engaged bidders and the bids are stalled out can reignite that frenzy. Because now they know the item is going to sell and they really can buy it, right?
That second interaction—we just mentioned it on the previous slide—was notifying the seller when the buyer has a question, right? Especially if you're getting close to the end of the timeline when the auction’s going to end. In the last webinar we talked about shipping that million-dollar ring from New York to Texas, and insurance, and how the best insurance coverage you could get with UPS is only $200,000. So we talked about how you get additional supplemental insurance and things like that.
But what if I'm considering purchasing a family heirloom. It's out in New York. It's a million bucks. I have no idea. I don't have time. There's only twenty minutes left for the eAuction. I may be in or out on $1,000,000 item if I can't ask a question. But if I could ask you a simple question and go, “Hey, Seller, can this thing be insured up to a million bucks?” “Yes, there's three different companies we know of that sell supplemental insurance. And you can also do that through a long haul carry company.” “Oh, OK, great. I'm in.” And that was a simple five-second question.
But if I can't get an answer to that and I can't engage the seller and—you keep calling it trust, I love that word—if they can’t instill that trust and trust that it's going to show up, I'm out and I may just completely lose my bidders. I think that’s really important when we're talking about that interaction between the seller and the buyer.