Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) talk about integrating online auction platforms with back-office software.

Part 4 of a 7-part series (Return to Part 3)

RON: Let's dive into the integration to the back-office application that you just mentioned, because that's one of the areas I feel Clarity has a big advantage. Over the sixteen years we've been in business with our integration platform, Clarity Connect—which we really haven't talked about during this series yet—we've integrated over 3000 different back-office integrations, so we literally can integrate with any ERP, CRM, PIM, WMS. You name it, we integrate with it, right? We've done it for thousands of companies.  

what is hipaa

RON: The issue here is, most eAuction software can integrate with a lot of the payment providers, because every eCommerce platform, every auction platform, has to do the basics, right? They have to integrate with authorize.net, PayPal, and things like that. That part's easy. The hard part is when all of a sudden in midstream I have to—and I mentioned that one scenario a minute ago—the dollars come in or the order comes in in Canadian dollars, and then in the back end that gets sent through fulfillment, but they're fulfilling it in another country. 

Where and how does that translation happen? Does it happen when it just goes into my charge account and authorize.net gets it in in Canadian dollars, but they put it into my account as U.S. dollars since I bank with them. Okay, some of that's automated, but when it gets reported into my ERP for fulfillment for my accounting team, it's not going to flip that.

what is hipaa

RON: So I may want to have our Clarity Connect in the back end connecting multiple different entities and APIs because we have different [options]. And we're going to talk about this on an upcoming slide here in a minute, an API for switching to payment plans. If somebody opts to pay with a payment plan currency conversion rate, we might want to have a live API that we can go out and get any country’s currency rate at the exact time that the eAuction closed. 

So we can come back to you in your ERP and post in your accounting application that this one cleared.  And these are the commissions that should be paid out, right? That might be another API. We might need the other APIs like we talked about in...I think it was Chapter 5. We talked about escrow and we talked about Payoneer and some of the escrow payments, that's another API. We might have an API into the scheduling application. So as we're scheduling all the types of auctions, we know what auctions are coming up and when they're going [to end].  

If you're offering warehousing and distribution of the items like Amazon Prime does—you're going and buying things on Amazon. But with Prime, they actually house warehouse items and ship that and then take another rate. And so Amazon has to track all that and you might be doing that.  

That happens a lot, especially when eCommerce auctions are both brick and mortar and online. For example, like an estate auction, right? They bring all those estate items and then they'll have a local auction there, but they'll also have video cameras and have it online broadcast so people can go online and go, “Oh, hey, I want that heirloom.” But there will be people in the room as well. And so now the auction house has to deal with a lot more than just allowing a transaction to occur in their eAuction platform. They're literally dealing with storing lots, tracking timing, when does it come up on auction, selling and shipping those items as well.  

So Clarity Connect is our eCommerce integration platform that allows us to connect to APIs, SDK databases, file types, all of the different types of connections that you would have with all of these different entities. We're going to cover a couple of them. One on payments. Then we're going to cover a second one, when we talk about VAT, GST, taxes, international shipping labels, things like that, that's another one that we're going to talk about. So thanks for bringing that up. I think that's a great idea.  

Continue to Part 5 to learn about APIs and Clairty Connect.