Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) use this webinar to explain the importance of API connections and talk about Clarity's proprietary Connect.

Part 5 of a 7-part series (Return to Part 4)

RON: Why don't you just talk about the different types and many different payment gateways and payment entities that we've integrated with [Clarity Connect] in the past, and how we do that? 

what is hipaa

CHRIS: Absolutely, thanks. Fundamentally, the main takeaway here for anyone who's listening is, whenever you're working with an online auction platform provider, you want to look for adaptability. And we've talked about this before. Whenever it comes to payments, this is absolutely critical, and this is a big challenge for a lot of SaaS-based platforms.  

They tend to be very commoditized. This can be good in the sense that they're going to be constantly rolling out new features. But it can also be bad [because they’re not going to adapt to] a particular workflow or process that you need for your business. They're going to stick with a more commoditized path.  

This can really become evident with payment providers. There are a lot of very popular payment hub providers that we have listed here that we've worked with in the past. The bottom line, though, is that we can work with any payment provider that has an API, any payment provider that's available, we can incorporate for you. This is really powerful when you get to a very specialized market, a high-end market, or operating at scale and working to take advantage of a particular payment provider that has beneficial rates, or possibly terms that just make more sense for your customers, and maybe specific escrow workflow like we've talked about in the past. 

Having this adaptability is fundamental to thinking how you're going to scale your business. This is what we've seen over the years. We've seen many customers come to us and say, “We painted ourselves into a corner.” How many times have we seen that before, Ron, where they come to us and that's the bottom line, right? That's what we would advise here.  

But the other piece that we're always looking at is being able to turnkey and quickly progress your business from where it is to that ideal point down the road. So you have to have very turnkey options off the shelf. You can see a lot of those here, this is a representative list. Regardless of whether you work with Clarity or another eAuction platform, we encourage you to look for this capability, not just on the payment side, but really everywhere. This is just us showing what we're capable of on the payment side of things.

what is hipaa

RON: Yeah, and this is just a small list. I mean, the most important thing to understand as you're picking a platform is, you will never only connect to one. Because probably 50% or more of your eAuctions are going to be tracked, and one from a mobile device. So do you want, or have you thought about, allowing Apple Pay, Google Pay, mobile pay options, and have you integrated that from the get go?

So when these online auctions are over and they get a notification and they're out on their phone and they have to pay for that item, have you thought about that, and are you going to allow them to pay? I mean, I've got my Apple Pay attached to my bank card and I pay my rent every month, mortgage payments every month. I pay car payments. You can literally use Apple Pay with any payment device. And that's what you have to think about.  

One of the things you can do is, you can look at your different devices just using simple Google Analytics, right? What are the devices hitting your auction website and what's the breakdown? I remember when I came here to Clarity ten years ago—if I’m remembering correctly—it was like 14% of the people coming to our website when I got here were on a mobile device. And I think the last time I checked, it was up in the like 70% or 50%. I mean, it was more than half now on mobile visits. And so obviously you have to make sure that you understand the representative audience and even the devices that they're coming to. 

Are they going to pay from those devices? Are you going to force them to drive somewhere, get on a computer and log into your auction website software, and only pay from a computer? The more convenient and the more options that you've thought through that specifically target and service your audience, the better and the more they're going to come back and do repeat business on your eAuction software

CHRIS: That's right. Exactly. 

Continue to Part 6 to learn about payment features.