RON: Yeah, I agree. The thing is is that with auction sites especially, I mean, we've done custom eCommerce solutions now for 16 years, and most of the time, most of the notifications don't necessarily have to happen in real-time. Typically, you buy something on the storefront, you get a receipt, there's one notification. When something comes back into stock, that's about the only one that really comes in, but again, it doesn't necessarily have to be real-time. But with auction sites, you have to have the full entire gamut because when I set a max bid of a hundred bucks on an item, as soon as it gets outbid, I have to be notified immediately because I have to go back and either rebid or I'll lose the item or up my max bid again. I don't want to have to set that up. I don't want to have to think about that. I just want to go in and type a max bid of a hundred bucks, and I expect that some of those notifications are auto set up. But then as you said, there has to be really super configurable ones.
For example, in the last webinar, if you guys didn't attend series two, I mentioned just a quick example about if investors in California and this auction site were about real estate and those investors if they were looking at properties out here in Austin, Texas, they wanted to put in an alert—we call it a scout—"For every property between 2000 and 2400 square feet, between $400,000 and $500,000, comes up at all, notify them immediately. They want to bid on every one of those properties." Then that one, as you just mentioned is an extremely configurable notification. Where others, like when I put a max bid in there should be automated notifications.
The other one you just mentioned is if a seller or a potential buyer has a question and it's in the middle of the auction and it's almost near the end and I'm the seller, I want them to notify me immediately if you have a question so I can answer so they'll want to participate and help bid my item up. So you're very on point with the fact that you've got to have a lot of real-time, a lot of configuration. I think we also have to have a lot of implied and automated notifications to just come out of the box that users can expect.
CHRIS: Agreed, Ron. One of the things that I've seen a lot that might be particularly unique to the eAuction software space as well, is that some businesses have a significant need to adjust their notification capabilities. Let's talk about a few examples.
Number one, whenever you're dealing with something that's a high value item, there may be a key part of the process that has to happen before anyone can even bid. One of the challenges with auctions is making sure that enough people actually participate in the auction. Basically, if there aren't enough participants, then unfortunately even with all of the best eAuction platform and the best software that you could possibly use and the best auction items, the auction will be a failure. So it's really important to be able to help move the buyers along in the process, especially for relatively complex escrow, verification, making sure that there's a deposit, things like this that have to happen before they can get into the weeds. And so we want to not only notify the buyers of certain steps during the bidding, but also make sure that they're moving through this workflow.
Another example that's really interesting is in-person and offsite. We also will work with different auction teams and help them set up tablet devices, kiosk type of devices, and it's possible to coordinate this with offsite bidding so the two can have happen at the same time. Now, although that technically this ought to go very smoothly and be a typical process, whenever you're in person, it can be really helpful to have different types of auctions that might be showing on a screen. Maybe they're visually going to present differently whenever it's a kiosk mode. Maybe they're even in different types of interactions that occur based on proximity to a kiosk device. So somebody might have a mobile device, they're using the app, and they get close enough to a device and now they become notified.
These are just some interesting aspects that we want to make sure that for your particular business, if you're not engaging in these right away, it's probably good to at least think about, three to five years from now, where is the business going to be in the ideal scenario, and how can we plan for that so we can at least have some core structure that we can be thinking about together in advance.
RON: Yeah, that's true. Another thing too that I think people forget sometimes is it's not just that you'll build a platform and they're all going to come; you literally have to get in front of them. The owners of the auction site, one of their responsibilities is to bring the buyers. So sometimes, especially if you have these high auction types, as people register, as people bid, you might want to have the automatic subscription to future bidding of those same types of items as an option for them to opt into. So if I went in and bid, let's talk a huge purchase, a Ferrari 250 GTB 4-Cam, a multimillion dollar automobile. Well, if I went in and bid on one and I lost that auction and another one came up in three months, don't you think I'd want to be notified proactively?
So if I went in and bid on one as part of signing up and bidding on that, there should be on that custom auction website an ability for me to either set a scout, like you'd mentioned last time, or to have an auto-subscription into distribution notifications in different types of auctions so that a proactive notification can go out a month in advance and start getting people excited for upcoming auctions and bring that audience. That's really what's going to make the site successful.
So notifications isn't just in the midst of the auction and the bids and the notifications and the questions; it might be months in advance to, as Chris just mentioned, bringing the buyers along. Maybe bringing the buyers along is notifying more potential buyers so that they come in, get on the process, get preapproved so that they can participate in the bidding, and you have many, many more attendees to bid on those items in your eAuctions.
CHRIS: Ron, I couldn't agree more. The other piece of the notifications that can be really challenging for some eAuction platforms, is just physically having the capability to work with different devices. In particular, there's some level of infrastructure and effort that's required to make sure there's a very valuable and effective web presence, progressive web application, PWA potentially, mobile applications, tablet applications that work natively on different mobile app operating systems. And fundamentally being able to persist this presence and the omnichannel experience across different devices is actually a physical overhead for the business. So we encourage you when you're working with different vendors to be asking them the question, "is this something that you already have? And is it set up in a way that it's going to be possible to optimally configure across these different devices? In other words, what's the architecture here?"
Just to use an example; there are some different architectures for vehicles that would allow the vehicle chassis to be used for a truck, a suburban, and a car potentially. Maybe it's going to be a pretty beefy car. A single chassis and engine configuration with minor changes can be used for all three types of vehicles. Well, this is going to be massively, massively lower from an overhead perspective if it's truly effective, as opposed to having to make a new chassis and engine and in all of the components for a truck, for a suburban and for a car.
It's really the same idea here. What we want to do is we want to be able to architect. In our particular case, we're saying, this is how we have done the architecture. And unfortunately, Ron, we had to learn some of this the hard way.
RON: We did.