Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) discuss selling non-tangible products like trips, services, and subscriptions.

Part 5 of an 8-part series (Return to Part 4)

RON: So the next topic is, we've got the number of products in the catalog, but we're not just selling products, right? Sometimes we're selling services or sometimes we're selling things that are a little different. So, is eBay an eCommerce marketplace? Well, yeah, it is. Instead of just having products, we're having auctions. But those auctions are selling products or services as well.  

 

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RON: Other things that might be sold are events. So what does that mean? Well, we've got other sites that are selling trips, right? One of our clients is Catholic Travel. And they sell those excursions over to the Holy Land, to Israel, things like that. Well, they have a marketplace platform, and that marketplace will sell memberships, timeshares, events. They can even be ones that are private. So their local pastor, or whatever their title is, would put together a trip and then send that number to everybody. Everybody would come in and put the number in and then they would sign up for that travel itinerary. And then we have to deal with another thing, where they do layaway payments and they're paying for the trip for two and a half years before they go. Things can be really complex. 
 
So when you talk about numbers of events and the numbers of eCommerce auctions, that's a lot of other things that we have to talk about. Because with auctions I might have—this is a little bit different than the traditional watch list of Amazon. When I'm dealing with an auction, I'm going to have now a watch list where I'm watching auctions, where, as the price goes up and up and up or down and down and down, based on the type of auction, I want to know where that is at any point, because it may go out of my purview and I may not want to bid if it goes up over a certain amount. Or I want this thing no matter what, so I'm watching it. I need the notifications when somebody bids me and I need to bid on the put a max bid, things like that. 
 

what is hipaa

RON: So Chris, go ahead and talk, because there's a lot of complexity now when we start adding the addition of selling memberships, selling events, or holding auctions after you create a marketplace website, right? 
 
CHRIS: Yeah, and this really gets into having a platform that is flexible but is also coming with a lot of baseline capability. And one of the biggest things I want to encourage you to think about as you're working on your eCommerce marketplace platform, your operating it, and you're looking to make improvements, is asking the foundational question of what am I what am I dealing with here, and is it going to get me where I want to go over the next three to five years?  

Probably one of the biggest challenges is understanding that some of these features and capabilities are multiple millions of dollars of capital investment to really build out properly. And so, if the eCommerce platform you're working with doesn't have that foundation already, somehow that's going to have to get into place. 
 
So I would say that's probably the biggest thing, is making sure there's alignment with where you're going over the next three to five years with whatever platform you're going to be working with or transitioning to working with. Does it have those big chunks of capability as a baseline? And then, to your point, Ron, is very complex as you get into things like recurring membership management and making sure that users have the right presentation so they can see when those memberships are going to renew, they can receive the right notifications in advance so their expectations are managed and they don't forget.  

 

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CHRIS: If for whatever reason the renewal doesn't process properly, they get the right follow up and incentivize upselling the membership so they can upgrade to the next level. These are all really important pieces and that's just scratching the surface on the membership front. But there's a lot of value with the eCommerce marketplace, too, offering different membership levels. These can be based on paying for a membership. It can be based on behavior and incentivizing sellers and/or buyers to be good stewards of the marketplace and therefore receive certain membership benefits. So these can be combined, of course, and there needs to be logic to be able to handle that at scale. 
 
And then similarly, if we get into auctions and events, these are big opportunities to expand the scope of your online marketplace or be able to execute properly within your marketplace for your niche or niches that you're focusing on. You know, depending on the business model, it may be critical that you have the ability to execute on running events, being able to sell admission to those. It could be virtual events, it could be live events, being able to deal with all of the transactions for that, coordinating, allowing people to have selection and limited access to certain things, changing their roles and access to things based on the fact that they are participating in the event. 

Going to auctions, same type of concept here with the level of fidelity necessary for these areas. And one of the key foundational pieces that I'll point out about all of this, especially as you scale up, is looking at the entire workflow and understanding what we would call a happy path, which I would just generally define as the standard flow that someone's going to typically go through. 
 
Then you also have what I would call edge cases and identifying those nuanced situations that will most likely occur. They won't be very often, but they will occur. And we need to handle those and being able to appropriately prioritize around the happy path and really streamlining that, polishing that workflow, and then prioritize in different edge cases so that those can be automated to the point where they're very self-service and self-healing, when an edge case comes up.  

 

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CHRIS: This dramatically applies to auctions, of course, and a lot of it has to do with expectation management, with the messaging within each of the steps in the workflow for both buyers and sellers, and really understanding how to present that to the user. And then also with messaging and notifying them at the appropriate point and allowing them to have full control over that messaging cadence and the channels where they receive the notifications. 
 
This would include, do I receive a notification about an eCommerce auction every second if I have been outbid? Is it an auction that I don't care about, so stop messaging me so much. And how do I delineate between that? Do I want to be notified about this event that's coming up or my membership expiring? And do I want to get a text message or do I just want it only in my email? 
 
These are the questions that the users need to be able to understand where they can modify these settings and feel confident that it's going to have the fidelity, but it's not going to be too overwhelming in order to meet their needs. And so this is a balance. And again, these are the things that, as you scale up, they're going to make or break the credibility and the trust that folks put in your marketplace business. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that as well on. 

Continue to Part 6 to discover how gamification works on marketplace platforms.