Online Bidding Platforms - Part 2

First, a brief update. We spent last weekend running an auction in Dixon, MO, where we sold the contents of a rural museum - primarily consisting of vintage and antique farming and household implements (plows, corn planters, and the like, mostly horse-drawn). Additionally, there was some limited militariana, and a few other collectibles, mostly clocks and pocketwatches. Sort of a hodgepodge museum - the kind you're likely to find in a small town when a long time antiquarian collects too much to really call it a private collection, but not enough to open a full-scale museum in a larger town or city.

Secondly, I'll be spending my next weekend up in Wisconsin, teaching (alongside Classic) a class for the Wisconsin Auctioneer's Association, about Google, keyword searching, SEO, IT, and assorted social marketing perspectives. Should be interesting.

And now, back to the second part of the online bidding platform stuff.

This time around, I want to do a more thorough review of my personal favorite online bidding platform, Proxibid.

Proxibid is one of several online bidding platforms, offering auctioneers an improved, global reach with which to market their various wares. As I'm typing this, their frontpage lists 394 webcast auctions (5 currently running) and 136 timed auctions (13 ending today). What does that mean? A webcast auction would be a live simulcast sale - in which bidders are live and onsite, and can also participate through Proxibid's online bidding platform. A timed auction will be more familiar to those not in the auction field, as it is basically very similar to an eBay auction, with a few key distinctions. In a Proxibid timed auction, there is an automated bid extension that can help prevent "sniping", and in the process make the sale more like an actual live auction.

There are many positive things I have to say about Proxibid. In my humble opinion, they have the most elegantly designed bidding application (on the auctioneer's side) that I've used to date. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have some experience selling through iCollector, and I have run one auction with LiveAuctioneers. Both of those are fine sites, which I will review further in later posts. However, out of the three, I prefer Proxibid's Auctioneer application when I'm running a sale. There is a great depth of functionality with their application, enabling the auctioneer clerking a live simulcast sale through Proxibid to correct any of the potential auction de-railing problems that can happen when running a live simulcast auction in a quick enough fashion to keep the ball rolling and the money coming in. Their in-system messaging client is well thought out, with numerous pre-generated messages that can be sent out to those participating and viewing a live sale over the internet. Likewise, you can program your own messages in, and even select a group of commonly used messages into a sort of favorites list, which are then even more readily accessible. This is extremely beneficial for aiding communication between the auction company and the online bidders, and helps clear confusion and solve problems before they get out of hand. Another benefit to their platform app is the ease with which an auctioneer can manipulate the cataloged lots in the auction. At any given time during the sale, you can group lots together on the fly - selecting whether you want to sell them choice, apiece times the money, or all for one price. Similarly, if an error crept into the clerking record, you can at any point, send a previously sold lot back into the ring, and re-sell it to the correct bidder - this is extremely beneficial if you clicked either too fast, or too slow on a button, and awarded the item to someone who didn't actually win it. In most of the other systems I've experienced, correcting a problem such as this can take much longer, and usually involves reconciling the lot after the sale has ended. As it may not be obvious, I'll make a case for why being able to correct this during a live auction is so intensely beneficial. Imagine you have a very valuable lot. A collectible item worth, lets say, $5,000. The auctioneer begins calling for a bid, and the lot creeps up in value, from 2, now 3, now 4 thousand dollars. As the time ticks by, the bids slow, and finally he announces that the lot has sold, on the floor for $4,850. Unfortunately, you did not click properly, and on your online bidding platform, the lot appears to be selling to an internet bidder for $4,700. And you just clicked "Sold". And "Next Lot". Oops. In Proxibid, you can send the lot back to the ring, unsell it, and award it to the floor bidder for the appropriate amount. If this does end up causing consternation from your online bidders, you can offer to show them the video record (because you ARE videotaping your auction, AREN'T YOU!). Likewise, lets say that you have another item, which doesn't meet it's reserve, and the auctioneer is forced to pass...except as soon as he moves on to the next item, a bid comes in from the floor for the previous lot! In proxibid, you can move back to that previous lot, and open the bidding back up. And more often than not, once one person is bidding on an item, another or several others, will join in. And I've definitely had this situation come up, where the item is re-opened (from being passed, not re-opened after being sold, that is a whole other can of worms) where further bids came from online, raising the final sale price even higher. As an auctioneer, I can guarantee that anything (read anything moral, ethical, and legal) that is within my power to do, I will do, to help raise the final sale values of the items I'm selling. That's sort of the job description.

Anyway, this post has kind of gotten elephantine, so I'll continue next time, with a review of iCollector.

Online Bidding Platforms - Part 1

This is a post I've been wanting to do for a while, but I've been wanting to do it right. In order to do so, I'm going to break it up into multiple posts, for better clarity.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the industry term, a Live Simulcast auction, is an auction in which bidding occurs through an online portal alongside of either live onsite/in-house bidding, or multiple online portal sites. As an example, think of a local auctioneer, holding a sale in their building. There may be 75 or even 300+ bidders there on location (depending on the auction & auctioneer). At that sale, imagine a ringperson accepting phone bids on a call-in line. He or she can accept a single call at a time, taking a single bid at a time from each call. In order to take multiple bids on a telephone at once, you would have to have a large number of employees & a bank of phones. Not.Cost.Effective. The modern equivalent of phone bidding, is online bidding. There are a whole host of sites which let auction companies market their cataloged sales to an interested public, typically involving a flat per auction fee to the auctioneer, along with a percentage of the gross sales total from that auction. There are also other fees which can become involved, typically for extra marketing efforts for the benefit of a particular auction on behalf of the online bidding platform. With the addition of an online bidding platform, the same auctioneer who had live competition on his lotted items from 75-300 people, can now effectively spread his marketing on those items to ANYONE IN THE WORLD WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION. This is a no-brainer. If you have the technical expertise to create a spreadsheet, and can successfully manage your data, you can vastly increase competition, and therefore prices realized, on the items you are selling.

At Mound City Auctions, we've used 3 different online bidding platforms for live simulcast auctions & for online only timed auctions - Proxibid, iCollector, and LiveAuctioneers. Each has its merits, and each its flaws. Additionally, there are several other live online or timed internet only bidding applications to choose from. What my goal over the next several posts is, is to review the three that I've personally used, as well as take a look at others used in the industry.

Rental venues

Another day, another auction. Today we had our test run of a new rental facility (hence the update title). We have plans to make use of the American Legion post in Overland, MO for a regular monthly auction, and today we held our first sale* there *(first indoor sale, immediately following the Good Friday tornadoes, we relocated items from a house that were were scheduled to sell the contents of to the Legion post's outdoor pavilion in order to hold the sale, as we couldn't hold one in the tornado damaged neighborhood).

The sale went well, but not without some of the normal lurches & bumps that holding an auction in a new location can bring. For example, we could have used one more staffer to help conduct the sale, it would have made the load-in of the items we auctioned MUCH easier considering the triple digit heat index. Additionally, some revamps of our storage of auction items (particularly our webcams, which we use to display the current lot being sold on a projector) couldn't hurt. All that being said, the sale went fine, although there was some tension amongst the crew due to the heat and the missing webcam (which we found, with plenty of time to spare).

Back to the original point. Rental venues. For a small family owned auction firm (which many auction companies are) it can be very problematic to hold offsite auctions. If you don't have the capitol to invest in a full fledged auction house/hall, you can find yourself on the short end of the stick when it comes to several key aspects of the auction industry - warehousing of items & space to actually hold an auction. As a company, we've found several ways of managing these difficulties, while retaining a low overhead & still pulling off massively successful auctions.

Finding a good space to rent to hold an occasional multi-consignor sale is paramount. My recommendation is to go outside of the typical venues. While a hotel or conference center ballroom will most definitely provide a lush spot for your bidders, it can put quite a pinch on your company's pocketbook. Other options may be available, ranging from veteran's association halls, social club/organization buildings, churches, schools (private or parochial, typically), or, for those who are truly thinking outside the box, an open field and a fireworks tent of decent size. For a fraction of the outlay of buying or leasing a building, you can outright purchase a sizable tent, which can be erected with a minimum of effort in most homeowner's lawns to add space to on-location auctions, or can be used for multi-consignor sales with a little planning. Adding sides to a tent, as well as heaters or fans, can increase the amount of time during the year you can see reasonable usage. We have held auctions in the past during snowstorms with 10 degree (Fahrenheit) temps while inside the tent its a balmy 40 and virtually no wind.

Status report

Okay, so I've not been keeping this thing updated AT ALL, and that should probably change. I'm going to try and post on here at least once a week, and see if I can keep that up.

So, here is what has been going down at Mound City Auctions, and with me in general.

lessee...last update was in November of 2009. Wow...just wow. We've held a second comic book auction, last September. Broke another 98 or so world records at that one, and solved our shipping problems with comics - actually had a lot of positive feedback from our bidders. We currently have over 27,000 comics on consignment, and I'm going to be sending off roughly 350 comics to the Certified Guarantee Corporation (CGC) tomorrow for grading. Those books, and around 5,000 others, will be sold at our upcoming August 26, 27, & 28th auction here in St. Louis. So far, that is the only listing for that sale - and it only has the partial inventory list for the comics. The catalog is being processed - I still have to organize the comics into lot order (the lots are basically created, but don't have estimated grades on the raw comics yet, which I'm doing as I attach lot stickers to the bags & boards). Additionally, we will be selling the first 8,000 or so lower end Bronze, Copper, and Modern comics in an auction taking place on June 9th at the same location as the August comic auction, the American Legion post on Midland Blvd in Overland, MO. We've started to use that location as an auction hall, in order to keep our overhead low rather than buy or lease a building.

Our first Civil War Auction *(picture above is of some of the many, many swords from that auction) is coming up on July 22, 23, & 24th, also at the American Legion post. And our first Wine Auction is happening this Sunday - and is being live simulcast on both Proxibid and LiveAuctioneers. Which brings me to something I can actually speak a bit longer on and have something other than plugs in this post. Yay!

Live simulcast auctions are one thing - basically you have a live audience, like a normal auction setting - people sitting in chairs or standing around a tent, or a house, holding bid cards & generally having a good time. In addition to that, you have (if you are in a hall) a guy sitting on a computer and receiving bids from online participants, who typically are viewing information on the current lot on their home computers, as well as watching a live video and audio feed showing the auctioneer and the crowd at the live auction. You can also run remote, basically have the guy on the computer back at the office, and have him relaying bids through a headset to another guy on a phone at the auction site - this works well if you are doing the sale on location, and the auctioneer and crowd of onsite bidders have to be mobile to participate in the auction. We have been doing online auctions for a couple of years now, with pretty solid success. There are several online bidding platforms, and so far, my personal favorite is Proxibid - they have a combination of a knowledgeable staff, solid agents/representatives, good programming, and an easy to use application for both bidders and for auctioneers. However, it isn't perfect, and there are still some issues that tend to crop up from time to time - not that these are insurmountable, or completely the fault of Proxibid. For example, if you loose internet access - or have another technical issue (computer freezes, or something) you are forced to either continue the auction using the pre-bids (absentee bids) left from the online bidders until you can get the application online again, or you can switch to non-lotted items (if you have any). If you have any familiarity with auctions, you will know that anything which breaks the rhythm of the auctioneer's chant - even something as simple as taking a drink of water at the wrong time - can steal away the auction's momentum, which takes time to recover from. If you are planning on running a live simulcast auction, be ABSOLUTELY sure to check and double check ALL your technical gear - make sure your computer is running properly, make sure your internet connection isn't buggy, etc.

Running a live simulcast auction on multiple bidding platforms doesn't just double the effort, it goes exponential. The November 2009 comic auction was live simulcast on both Proxibid and iCollector. There is already a lot of effort & time that goes into crafting a catalog for a single online bidding platform - and typically the format of the data which one platform requires for uploading a completed catalog is completely different from that of another platform - additionally you must perform "idiot checks" to make sure you didn't leave a typo in that switches lot order on anything - otherwise you'll have one platform bidding on lot 95 while the other platform is bidding on lot 96, for example. This can cause massive issues. So caution is most definitely proscribed.

All those warnings aside - running an auction with a solid catalog of valuable items, on multiple online bidding platforms, in concurrence with a live onsite auction, can be very, very good for you, your bidders, and your clients. It helps widen the pool of available bidders, increasing the chance for people not previously exposed to your client's property to the property in order to bid & win it, increasing the competitive price of the goods in question, and in the end, creating more value for your client, and for your company. If you have the technical prowess & fortitude to make it happen, it can pay off.