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eAuction Video Chapter 5: Security, Performance, and Payment Types

Trust but verify

Payment Methods and Verification

Payment methods are also very important for auction eCommerce. Whenever someone is completing a transaction on the auction eCommerce platform, there's an element of trust with the platform owner that may not be possible to reasonably establish with the actual seller.

They might be small organization, or it may not be the organization that's directly selling or auctioning something. Many times, even if the auction software is only for use for your company, there may be just a lack of familiarity, especially for a large purchase amount, that causes some concern if someone hasn't dealt with you before.

That’s why it’s helpful to have forms of escrow; the ability to put the money into a third-party administrator account that then gets automatically distributed once the purchaser approves their fulfillment that they've received the items.

There would be verification for whenever the buyer has actually received the items that the escrow process would be able to handle, making sure that they actually did receive it and it was in good shape whenever it was shipped. In other words, it should be accepted if they're reasonable.

It’s necessary to have this kind of process for the payments, in addition to being able to handle not just credit card payments but also purchase orders, checks, checking-account-based payments, ACH integration or wire payments integration, etc. Depending on the situation, a business may also want to offer the ability to set up payment plans.

There may also need to be some form of pre-verification for the payment that would allow people to prove that they have the means to make a purchase, especially large purchases such as for a house or car.

Therefore, the payment process needs to be able to handle these scenarios and the cases that your business in particular might deal with.

UPGRADE YOUR SECURITY

Auction Platform Security

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When it comes to managing and storing sensitive information for clients, security should be considered a constant, ongoing effort that continuously improves.

For eAuction software, security would be offered as a service to provide ongoing support, upgrades, penetration (PEN) testing, and auditing of the security of the system. These audits and PEN tests can be as rare as once a year or as often as daily or even hourly, but there is an optimal solution that matches the business and its scale.

With how important security is, you ought to be looking for a partner who can deliver quality security and privacy for the end users’ data as well as sensitive data in general, such as payment and contact information, what people are purchasing in their auctions, if it was a B2B auction, etc. These things can be really sensitive, so it’s important they be protected.

CONFIGURE SOFTWARE THE RIGHT WAY

eAuction Application Performance

In a similar way, performance of the application is commonly an afterthought, and if you are offering a significant number of products or services for sale, hosting a platform where users can offer their own items to sell, or if there are international, overseas, or mobile users, your business will benefit dramatically from having performance considerations be part of the core offering.

To have the best benefits for your business, your development partner for building your auction platform should be able to scale from a base offering to an extremely robust, high availability, redundant environment that can be brought to an enterprise level if needed, with potentially thousands of concurrent users, millions of users a day, and hundreds of millions per year.

Doing an auction can be intensive depending on the way the application is configured. If it's configured properly, the basic usage of the site will be very performant at leveraging best practices with the right protocols for running the auctions and keeping the data up to date without taxing the hosting infrastructure.

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EXTEND CUSTOMIZABILITY

Extensibility of the eAuction Software

Extensibility is challenging for SaaS offerings, and it can be challenging for extremely commoditized product offerings for auction-based eCommerce as well.

This is because SaaS products are multitenant. This makes any customization, unless it’s rather generic, affect the core offering of the SaaS product. Multitenant means that multiple customers are using the same set of software files and a compiled application in order to run their application, website, mobile device, etc.

It’s like you’re in a house with several other people, and you all are sharing the same foundation, electrical system, etc., and you don't see each other every day. But you're all in the same structure, so if the power goes out on one, the power goes out for everybody. Therefore, if one customer needs a specific customization, that's going to affect all the other customers on that multitenant environment. That’s typically why, by default, SaaS doesn’t offer the capability of heavily extending and customizing.

There are some benefits to a SaaS offering, however. One benefit is that it gets continuous updates with its commoditized and standard offerings; although, the benefit of those automated updates must be weighed against the lack of extensibility, and how each supports the business’s needs.

Once the business is at a certain scale, or if there's a specific workflow requirement, then the best solution is to go with a single tenancy offering that’s either SaaS or on-premises. The single tenancy offering can still take advantage regular core updates, but its nature allows for very specific overrides and updates without affecting anyone else that's using the core code.

Extensibility relates to the first item that we recommend, which is being able to have business specific capabilities; extensibility is the mechanism by which most of that is accomplished. Ideally, there are configurations that we can do directly, but where that gets to the end of its capabilities, extensibility picks it up so that you can customize the software how you need to so that it can match the business.

Enhance Your Platform's Functionality

It’s important to choose the right partner, especially when it comes to security and performance. Clarity eCommerce Framework™ is designed with your needs in mind, and offers an incredibly robust, secure, and customizable platform. Improve your business workflows and operations with Clarity’s auction eCommerce platform. Talk to an expert today to get a free demo.

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