Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) finish their discussion about different types of auctions and the benefits of each.

Part 8 of an 8-part series (Return to Part 7)

CHRIS: We've got to be able to get buyers and sellers to interact, and typically it's going to be buyers. So if there is a max bid, but you're seeing that, “Hey, this is the max bid of $23 and the current bid is at $20.” But it's really easy for you to put settings in where you say, “You know what, I can put a setting in that auto-bids. If, for whatever reason, it looks like I'm going to get outbid, I'll just set it to go up to the max bid amount. And then this way I can really benefit the bid. As the auction is almost done, it looks like it has 4 hours left. So I have confidence in this auction platform that, if I just set my max at the max bid, I know that I will win, but I'm going to let it auto- bid on its own up to that max bid.”

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CHRIS: Another way of doing this is showing the inventory. If there's only one of the item and you really want to get it, you don't want anyone else to get it, you might have to actually buy now. And this is the consideration that we were talking about with the governance and with the different auction types. But the mechanics are really important because, as you were describing, Ron, with the scenario where you actually won a bid and the seller didn't fulfill on it, these are the things that cause people to go to different platforms, different platforms that enforce these notifications. They have the ability to keep the buyers in the top position automatically,  

For certain high bid type of bidding in auctions, you may have to interact with the users. Do you have a nice mobile app that they can use? Do you have a progressive web app? Is your platform capable of interacting with the users in their format or their medium? 

We want to make sure folks have access to their bids and to the eAuctions that they're watching. And then fundamentally, just some basic pieces of notification interacting with users intelligently. We don't want to interact with them too much and abuse that access to notify and share information. It needs to be easy for the user to say, “Hey, I want my notifications at this cadence, this frequency.” So it could be immediately for this type of category item or for this search that I have that it's going to filter out to just '68 Cameros, and maybe it's a certain colors. 

RON: It's got to be the ‘69. Chris it's got to be ‘69. 

CHRIS: So search results for ‘69 camera on an online auction, and it's got to be red. And so that might be my specific search that I want to only look for. And I wanted those notifications immediately, and I want them on text, email, and the mobile app, but everything else I only want to receive once a week and not really that interested in anything else about the site right now. 

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CHRIS: These are the things that—if you think about buyers and sellers of really expensive equipment, for example, maybe there's an equipment liquidation happening, and I want to know every single time one of those is happening. I'm not really sure what I'm going to buy, but I need to know that it happened so I can go look through everything that's for sale. If a business is being liquidated and they're trying to sell all the equipment, I want a shot at it. And so that notification from the online auction software can be really helpful. That's more general. 

Ultimately, the point is, this is a form of governance, and also a form granular notification format. And this can be make or break for your site. This alone can be a 10X, easily, on massively increasing the value you're adding to your users by giving them access, timely access, as well as automating some of the steps for them so that they can specify what they want to do, how they want their bids to be handled by the eAuction website, and really make sure that they're well-represented. Also that your site is looking out for them for what they want to get and value from the site.  

And so, Ron, I think that's a really powerful aspect of the notifications, pairing that with governance that the user gets to specify, they get to say how they want their assistant. If you want to think of it like that, the eAuction platform should really be seen in their mind as an assistant. And they should get excited about the fact that this site is enabling them to get in front of some of these deals that they otherwise wouldn't be able to get in front of, right?

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RON: Exactly. Everything's about timing, isn't it? I love the liquidation sales you were talking about. I mean, if you aren't on the eCommerce auction site within the first 15 minutes, all the best stuff gets picked through. That’s the thought process, right? So like you said, if the sites there watching for you and you've got that assistant that's keeping their eyes to the ground and every time something that you would bid on shows up and you're notified immediately, that just changes everything and they're going to keep coming back to you. 

So I love that we talked today about governance. We drove down and tried to talk through the different types of auction site. And it wasn't to tell you or teach you everything about every type of online auction. It was more or less to try to just introduce you to the different types out there. And then we covered the different types of notifications. 

So now that we covered that today, if you have any questions about any of those, please go ahead, hit our website Clarity-Ventures.com, schedule a demo. It'll be with me, I'll get on the phone with you. We'll talk through that and any questions you have. We'll run it through the team and if we can help you on an eAuction site, that would be great too. But we'd love to talk to you.  

We have probably another half-a-dozen iterations and chapters for the auction site. So thanks for attending today. Look forward to seeing you on the next one. 

CHRIS: That's all about how to run an online auction for today. Thanks, Ron. See you on the next one. Bye for now.