CHRIS: Typically, a lot of the value from the marketplace eComemrce platform is going to be helping with and facilitating, or at least providing standard options, for providing calculation for taxes, possibly VAT, being able to deal with things like different types of sensitive products that may have shipping restrictions, being able to deal with the logistics in the shipping lead time estimates, these kind of things.
Any thoughts that you want to share on that topic with regards to the number of vendors and sellers on a marketplace and some of the automation that we have to feather in, it doesn't make sense to do all of it all at once, because then you're going to burn through your capital too quickly, right?
RON: The one feature that you mentioned that was really important—all of them were—the product upload, right? Because you don't want a vendor coming in, uploading a product to the eCommerce platform and going, "Oh, I think this is goes in electronics when it really goes in electrical." It's similar but different, because what happens is another feature that we haven't talked about is compare. When I go to Amazon and I do a search for a product, I'm trying to compare prices, but who am I comparing prices between? Well, and comparing prices between Prime—the one that I know that I can guarantee get it here in a day or two—versus all the other vendors that are selling that same product.
So when I do a search or when I go look in a category, I expect to see multiple offers for that product across different vendors. But if we just allow the vendors to either willy-nilly select whatever they want and there's no—I don't remember, did you call it an approval process or an audit? When they bulk upload these products, do they go into an approval process? And as part of that process where they can only pick one category so they know they have to be real careful? Or do you have vendors and sellers that buck the system and assign their products to every category because they want their products to show up, even accidentally, on other searches?
What's the option to contact a seller? Do you have the messaging subsystem in the marketplace platform where you can allow people to talk to each other and not poach outside the system because you're not giving away personal information...or are you allowing that? So somebody couldn't go send a note to a vendor and say, “Hey, I'll buy a hundred of these if you give them to me for 100 bucks less.” And they take the deal outside your multi-vendor marketplace platform. Yet you're protecting your business as well. The shipping, logistics, and splitting all that shipping and tracking.