Auction eCommerce

Increasing Vendor Engagement in Auction eCommerce

September 30, 2022  |  5 min read

It goes without saying that buyers and sellers are equally vital to your business. You should do everything you can to make them both engaged by providing them with an intuitive eAuction platform. Only when you have met the needs of both buyers and sellers will your auction eCommerce website thrive.

Let’s talk about what it means to meet the needs of your sellers on your custom auction website. Your primary goal should be to make it as easy to list items as possible, because that benefits every user of your site. You must provide simple tools for tracking auctions, comminating with potential buyers, and shipping items.

But the needs of sellers go beyond the individual auctions they list. Sellers want information so that they can track their performance on the site and increase their performance in future sales. Here’s how a flexible online auction website can improve seller performance.

Give Sellers Value

Sellers are always looking for ways to make their business better. Your auction platform might just be one outlet for the items they sell, so it’s likely they’re getting information from several sources. In order to provide them with the information they’ve come to expect, you need to provide reports and analytics that will help them.

These self-service reports are automatically generated by your platform, creating an immersive experience for sellers and providing value that they might not be getting from other online eAuction platforms.

The Information Buyers Want

The kind of information you can offer your customers is virtually limitless. The Clarity eCommerce auction platform has many options built in, but others can be added depending on the needs of your industry. Look to your competitors to find out what they’re offering, then offer more. You can even ask your sellers what kind of information they’re looking for and add it later.

  • Old Bidders vs. New – The platform can tell how many bidders are new to their auctions, which can let them know if their advertising is working.
  • Number of Sales – This is an excellent way to track sales over a longer period, whether it’s weeks, months, or years.
  • Bid by Day/Time of Day – When the average buyer bids often change by category, so you can’t advise everyone to end their auctions at a specific time. Keeping track of when bids occur can help a seller decide the best time to end their auctions.
  • Bidders by Region – You can provide sellers with information regarding bid origination, whether by state, country, or some other metric. This can help them decide if they need to warehouse items in a specific region so that shipping times and costs are reduced.
  • Amount of Money – It’s always important to sellers to know just how much the sales have brought in and let them know just how well your auction website is doing for them.
  • Average Order Value – How much is the average amount per item compared to other platforms the seller might be selling on? Are those numbers going up like they should?
  • Watched Items – How many items are being watched, and is that number going up or down? What changes can be made to change the “watchers” to “bidders”?
  • Refunds – How much money has been refunded? Which items are most likely to be refunded? This can help sellers determine what items might not be worth offering, as those items might actually be costing them money.

How to Deliver Reports

Reports can be delivered in any way you choose; again, this will differ based on the industry you’re serving. Pie charts, bar graphs, trend lines, maps, 3-D representations, and tables are just a few of the ways that this important information can be relayed. All of this information can also be downloaded and used in CRM software.

These graphs and charts can also be dynamic to serve the seller’s needs. They can be filterable or sortable, allowing the seller to drill down to the information that’s most important to them. For example, sellers can choose to view sales in their home country and exclude sales in other countries. Or they could filter by sales amount to find out what their biggest sales of the year were.

Gamification Works

Gamification is a way of changing someone's behavior by turning tasks into games. It’s a popular way to get people to continue doing something that they might otherwise not want to do, or do something that doesn’t usually become a habit. Adding competition to an exercise app and giving virtual trophies for practicing a new language daily are two common examples.

Your auction platform software can set goals for your sellers, and when they reach that goal they can be rewarded with a quality badge or free advertisements on the site. You can also anonymize the data of their competitors, letting a seller know where they rank in sales. This information can make sellers competitive as they try to beat the sellers above them.

Make the Most of Your Auction Platform

The right auction platform developer can deliver reporting tools that you buyers need and give them features to improve their performance on yo- website. Some tools will be “off the shelf,” while others can be custom-built during auction website development to address specific needs.

Our website is filled with articles about the nuances of auction eCommerce to help you understand every aspect of how it works and what you need. We also have an eAuction YouTube playlist where you can choose the specific topic you’d like to learn about.

Clarity has created a B2B auction platform to rival any you’ll find on the market, at a cost we think you’ll appreciate. We’d love to show it to you. We also offer a complimentary discovery process, a no-pressure plan that you can use with us or take with you to a different developer. We’ve helped many businesses succeed in the auction sphere, and we’re here to help you succeed too. Be sure to get in touch with us to get things started!

 

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Author
 
Stephen Beer is a Content Writer at Clarity Ventures and has written about various tech industries for nearly a decade. He is determined to demystify HIPAA, integration, and eCommerce with easy-to-read, easy-to-understand articles to help businesses make the best decisions.