CHRIS: You can have all the best intentions in the world, you can have all the greatest ideas and the most value in your niche, but you really can't deliver that for all of your different users that are working with your marketplace unless you have self-service, unless you have automation, and unless you can deliver it consistently at scale. And that's exactly what you described, Ron. And I think it is so critical for folks to take the time and just think this through for your business.
What's really helpful here is working with a team who have gone through this process many, many times, executed on it in production, and then made changes, that are researching it constantly. Certainly, we would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with you in this way. But whoever you work with, please make sure that you select a team that has this type of experience that we're bringing.
Ultimately, the point here is that you want to get through each of the steps in the process, just like you described. And I think you said it very well, so I'll just keep it short and sweet and just say: Pretty much everything in the process can be automated, or at least the friction can be massively reduced. And you want to really think about this from every different angle or vector, if you will, within your B2B or C2C marketplace.
How are the sellers thinking about things, not just what are they doing, but how are they thinking about it, how are they perceiving it, and how can you influence that consistently? Because if you can get people to be on a higher plane of thought and executing at a higher level as sellers and maybe operating with more integrity, operating with higher quality standards, quicker turnaround times...well, this is going to be an upward spiral and it's going to be same thing for buyers. And you get more buyers because they find it more dependable to work with in your marketplace. And how can you set up infrastructure to monitor this? And like you said, Ron, look at the reporting.
So there's a lot of depth to this. We certainly go into it in a lot of detail. It's a key aspect for your marketplace to really make it into an upward spiral.
RON: Yeah, exactly. And I'll give you a real-world example here. I went on a new marketplace I'd never bought on before. About two weeks ago, my brother swears by it, and he's bought thousands of things on there. So I said, okay, I'll try it out.
I had been looking—and I think you guys have heard me in past videos. I was a DJ many, many years ago back in college, and so I'm big into vinyl, so I have a great vinyl collection. And I've been looking for this particular album. And if you guys are really interested, it's Motley Crew’s Theater of Pain. I finally found it, and right now it's going for about 100 bucks, which is a lot on vinyl when you're like me trying to collect.
So I found this great deal on this piece of vinyl. I ordered the vinyl, all excited, was really pumped about this new marketplace website because it was the first marketplace where I actually found it at a reasonable price. And the marketplace did a really good job of automating almost everything. Within three days it was an email. “Hey, we've notified your seller that they had to ship your item by today, so it should have shipped. And then it was like notification. “We got a notification that your item has shipped from the seller. I'm like, “Hey, that's really cool.”
Well, then three days later I get a notification that says, “We can't pay your seller until you rate the seller, you're behind.” And I'm like, I haven't got the item yet. And then I get another one that says,” Hey, you're not meeting the policy because you haven't raided the seller yet and we can't release their funds.” I'm like, I still haven't got the item yet.
Finally, like seven days later, I get the shipping tracking status, the tracking status for the last nine days has been “waiting for estimate from carrier.” I don't even know what that is. So it looks like FedEx came and picked it up and the FedEx person went, “Ooh, nice album, it's mine.” And they stole it and never updated or never did anything. And it's been nine days.
So here I am two-and-a half weeks later, I still don't have it. I poked around on their site six different places and there is no scenario—they've got all these automated scenarios—there is no scenario for me other than just canceling the order. But I want it and I want to get it. And it took me three different times poking through the website before I could find a place to notify the seller.
I sent the seller a note like four days ago. Still nothing back. And now I don't even know what I'm doing. I don't know if my money's gone. I don't know if I have to request to cancel the order, or is it a refund at this point? Have I paid for it? I don't know.
So I probably am never going to buy from that marketplace site again, even though my first initial couple of days I was completely elated and it was amazing and I was excited that I found this new place. And here I am, just complete sour taste in my mouth, no governance, no policy to deal with my scenario, and almost no recourse because I don't know what to do and I don't have a phone number to pick up and call somebody.
So that's where the governance and the business policies come into play. You have to go through these scenarios. What happens when X? Chris said it great. You want it fully automated, you want to make it self-service. So how does Ron the buyer deal with the seller? Is it the seller's fault? I don't know, because they claim that they gave it to the shipping carrier. But the shipping carrier hasn't done anything for nine days. So I can't believe that unless the shipping carrier picked it up and it fell down in a slot in their truck and it never made the main office and it just disappeared. I mean, I have no other way to know what happened.