Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) use the second part of this webinar to talk about the problems of too much governance on your eAuction platform.

Part 2 of an 8-part series (Return to Part 1)

CHRIS: You can also do something where you have too much governance, and that can be a problem, too. So this is more of a craft or an art form than just a science. But again, there is a science aspect to it as well. A lot of what we look for and work on with our clients is leveraging the data, the analytics, and being able to properly monitor and even directly interact with customers on the auction platform. Either via surveys or feedback forms or direct conversations, and understand, “What is too restrictive in the governance.”

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CHRIS: Just to give you some specific examples, when a seller is listing in eAuction software, when a buyer is essentially registering and validating that they qualified to make a bid on a very expensive auction. [With] these types of processes, the governance is going to dictate what's required, what information quality there will have to be, guidelines for images and image quality. What ramifications [are there] if someone is inaccurate with their bid, or if they don't fulfill the types of auctions within a certain timeline. These are the types of things that would go into governance. 

RON: That makes perfect sense. You know, another way to say it is rules of engagement for you eCommerce platform. But in my head, the best way I could explain it to people is as an HOA. We've all owned homes, I’ve owned five homes. And my last home, we were in an HOA, and I was really excited because we lived on the golf course. We were in a golf course community, and our homes were relatively expensive. I didn't want people not mowing their lawn. I didn't want people not weeding their gardens. I didn't want people not keeping their homes nice and lowering the value of our homes in such a nice community.  

So for me, I looked forward to an HOA, but I would be willing to bet everybody listening to this webinar has heard of a horror story of an HOA, right? Everybody thinks they're so restrictive and they're assigning fines and they're happy-go-lucky. Okay, well, if you're and HOA and your rules of governance are governing everything about your auction site, what HOA do you want to be? Are you going to be the one that preserves the value, preserves the way people communicate, doesn't allow people to yell and swear and do things that would drive people away, keep the better auctions, the higher online auctions away. 

You think about the difference between—I don't know if you golf, I love to golf. I’m not a very good golfer, but I love to golf. You think of the difference of your local walk-on a golf course versus a country club. And you walk in and they're completely different. I caddied to both growing up, and my tips were like three bucks at the local place where people were wearing tank tops and shorts.

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RON: And yet at the other place, the country club where they just required long pants and collared shirts, that's literally all their governance said. But the difference between those two was night and day, and my tips were three bucks versus 15 bucks, right? I mean, they didn't even compete. And the people were much more classy, the way they carried themselves at the country club. It just completely changed the ambiance.  

So how do you want your eAuction website? Are you running penny auctions? Are you running real estate auctions? Do you want to be the Beverly Hills of auction sites? That's what governance does. As you start thinking through your governance, you want to [decide] what the rules of engagement are? Do people have to wear collared shirts? Well, then they have to dress up a little bit.  

It's that thought process that, if you think through when you put your governance together, will help you guide the kinds of people, the kinds of interactions, and the kinds of communication that happen on your B2B or C2C eCommerce website. So I think we've really hammered through governance. 

Continue to Part 3 to find out more about English auctions.