In this final segment of the Payments webinar, Chris Reddick and Ron Halversen talk about how offering international sales on your eAuction platform can be a great opportunity, despite the extra work.

Part 7 of a 7-part series (Return to Part 6)

RON: Now let's start talking about international and B2B auctions. With international, you mentioned there are some countries that may not be as trusted to ensure that you buy and have things shipped, so we talked about escrow. If you want more about escrow, [in Chapter 5 we talked about] escrow in depth. We talked about things like Payoneer, escrow.com, and dove into escrow payments.  In this webinar, we already talked briefly about multi-currency and multilingual—I'm not going to go in too deep there. 

The things that really start coming in are the customs, duties, taxes, VST, GDPR. Those are all acronyms, and I think everybody listening in today probably knows what they are, but we have to deal with those, right? Because if I have an eCommerce auction here in the States and somebody in the EU is bidding on that, and they have pre-registered and pre-authorized and put their bank information and stuff up online. do they now have a legal right to say, “Okay, you have to forget me and delete all that information because GDPR says you have to.”  

Here I am in the U.S., I'm not even thinking about that, but I've got bidders from on my B2B auction site from around the world that I've allowed. I haven't restricted them to come in and bid. So now I have to start thinking about, well, what happens if somebody in London wins the bid? And then after they win and the whole thing is processed, they want to be able to come in and click a button and say, “GDPR says you can forget me now.” 

So now all of a sudden I've dealt with GST, VAT, international shipping, international shipping rates. How am I going to calculate and let people know? Is that my responsibility as part of the auction platform, or is that between the buyer and the seller? Is GDPR an issue for the site? There are five, ten, fifteen different things that you have to think through just because of an international transaction. Do you want to talk through some of the technical implications of how we can instrument that in the B2B auction platform.

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CHRIS: Absolutely. You know me, I love to talk through that. I'll try to keep it high level though, so I don’t bore anyone. I would say a lot of what you just covered was probably technical enough for most folks. The summary would be that, whenever we're dealing with these pieces that have to happen, there can be interdependencies between them. 

This is really where you're going to run into trouble from a business perspective with using off the shelf or restricted-development access platforms for a custom auction website, especially when you get into the level of fidelity that you just described, Ron, which is really what happens whenever businesses scale up or expand to international, et cetera. And really in any relatively complex scenario. 

This is why you want to work with an eAuction company and an auction partner who can deliver this customizability while still coming out of the gate with a very commoditized set of capabilities. And that's really what we provide here at Clarity. We certainly have the experience dealing with the scenarios that Ron just described. 

I think the bottom line here is that any scenario that you can throw at us—or, just in general, if you're looking for the concept of who to look for, if it's not Clarity, a customizable eAuction platform [vendor]—any scenario that you can throw at a company like Clarity, we can take care of. That's what you need to look for, for your business at a certain point.  

If you're at that point where you're wanting to scale and look at three to five years down the road, that's really the bottom line. You're going to need someone who can deliver on these capabilities for you and integrate these systems. If you look at all of your competitors, if you look at the large scaled up competitors, that's what they all do behind the scenes. 

We know; we've delivered for many of them during auction website development already! And we certainly want to help you grow and scale into your niche—and take over your niche and really continue to grow into multiple categories that you can deliver a lot of value to your customers. Ron, feel free to close us out on anything else. 

RON: Yeah, sounds great. I think you covered payments in many types of auctions really well, and thanks for that. Well, I want to thank the audience again today and hope to see you on a future video. I've also gone back and put links to all previous chapters and put descriptions as to what's covered in each chapter. Hopefully that's a little helpful for you. So if you want to go look at the extensibility Chris was just talking about, that's in Chapter 5. If you want to talk about eCommerce integrations, that's in Chapter 3. That stuff is in the description. So visit the description. You can revisit any of the previous chapters and we hope to see you in a future video. Bye for now. 

CHRIS: Thanks, Ron. Bye for now.