The blogs lit up last week with the news that eBay was granted US Patent 7,702,540 regarding “computer-implement method and system for conducting auctions on the internet”. Here’s the abstract.

Methods and apparatus for a system for facilitating electronic commerce transactions with a first data storage location for holding information about an item for auction from a first participant in a data packet network, a verification process that verifies the user identification of the first participant in said data packet network, the verification process confirming a user identification before allowing the participant in said data packet network access to place information about an item for auction in the system, a display process for displaying information of the item for auction to a plurality of data packet network users, the display process displaying an advertisement with the item for auction to the plurality of data packet users, an auction process for receiving bids on the item for auction from at least one of said plurality of data packet network users, the auction process also verifying a user identification from said at least one of a plurality of data packet network users before allowing receipt of the bid and a notification process for notifying the plurality of data packet network participants that said bid was accepted by said system.

eBay's Internet auction patent

It’s unclear if eBay will actually protect this patent, first filed in 1999. Speculation exists on both sides, with one camp saying that eBay will use licensing as an additional revenue source and another camp saying that eBay’s continued deemphasis of its auction model in favor of fixed prices means that they likely won’t be interested in using this patent.

How are you betting? Let us know in the comments.

PayPal has a bad rap among auctioneers. When polled during education courses, very few auctioneers admit to using the service due to reasons ranging from the fee structure to the preferential treatment of buyers during disputes to the simple fact that they don’t like PayPal’s parent company, eBay.

It may be true that PayPal’s fee structures have historically been higher than the rates charged to auctioneers by credit card companies. It may be true that it’s easier to find a credit card partner – such as NAA Cashless Commerce – who understands the auction industry enough to work for the auctioneer instead of the buying customer during dispute resolution. It also may be true that PayPal has been seen as a tool of the enemy by auctioneers who are afraid of eBay because they consider it to be competition.

All of these reasons to avoid PayPal notwithstanding, we feel that the times are a-changing with regards to electronic payments. The remaining days of the daisy-chained transaction fees charged by vendors and merchants and banks and credit card companies on every single transaction are waning.

Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey‘s latest endeavor, Square, allows credit card transactions to be completed on iPhones. Imagine buying Girl Scout cookies and having your credit card charged by a 13-year-old at your front door. Paying digitally for smaller-value transactions will – and must – become second-nature for us as these technologies mature.

PayPal is opening up its tools in order to evolve from it’s current function as a payment option to become a transaction platform. These tools, called the Paypal X Developer Network, allow developers with great ideas to use PayPal’s tools to make payment processing easier and cheaper without having to know how to transfer money or deal with the bureaucracies inherent to banks and financial institutions.

Just as the credit card revolutionized the way we pay for goods and services by replacing cash, this new crop of digital transaction technologies leveraged on PayPal’s tools will affect the same type of revolution, not by interfacing with or serving as credit cards, but by supplanting them.

Five years ago, the concept of paying bills on the Internet was downright foreign and scary for many users and service providers alike. Some users still avoid electronic commerce, but most banks and service providers now support it – some even incentivize it by taking a couple of dollars each month of the bills of users who use automatic electronic payments. As more and more Americans accept the convenience and security of digital transactions, there will come a point in the not-so-distant future when an auctioneer who only takes cash, checks and credit cards will be leaving money behind from potential customers who no longer utilize any of these outdated forms of payment.

We mentioned subdomains in our recent series about branding. We’ve discussed DNS before, but we’ve never looked directly at subdomains and how they can help us as auctioneers create a better experience for our users. The first part of this post, like any good figure-skating routine, has a technical component, but stick with us because there is cake waiting at the end.

URI

A Uniform Resource Identifier, or URI, is a string of characters that can be used to identify a name or resource on the Internet. Sometimes used interchangeably with URI, a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, is a subset of URI and is used to describe where a resource is located and how to get it.

URL parsing

A URL consists of several components. We’ll use the following example.

http://www.auctioneertech.com/auction-podcast

The first part that you see is the scheme, or protocol. http tells us that we’re going after an insecure web page. Other schemes include https, ftp. This is the part of the URI that tells our browser how to get the resource.

Everything in the URL that’s after the first foreslash tells our browser the resource to request from the server. In this case, it’s going to look for the /auction-podcast page.

The remaining  part in the middle, between the two consecutive foreslashes and the first single foreslash, is the domain name. This consists of several parts. Our browsers actually parse these domain names in reverse, looking first at the right-most part, then moving left. We’ll work from right to left in our explanation.

The right-most part, as you’ll remember from the last episode of the Auction Podcast, is the top level domain. In our case, it’s .com. It could be .net, .org, .us, .info, or one of many other TLDs. Establishing the TLD tells our browser the kind of domain it’s looking for. Once it knows that it’s looking for .com, it doesn’t have to worry about the many other possible domain types.

The second-most-right part in our example is auctioneertech. This is the primary domain name which, when combined with the TLD of .com, is enough for our browser to be able to contact the appropriate name server. Each domain has a name server, which houses all relevant information about a domain name. This information includes the IP addresses of the server, the email records which dictate where mail gets delivered for the domain, as well as information regarding subdomains. This information is stored in the name server in a zone file.

Armed with the information from the zone file, our browser now continues to move left in its parsing of the domain name. Left of the primary domain name auctioneertech, it finds a subdomain called www. The www subdomain has become essentially a default subdomain. Most zone files specify that the www subdomain is an alias of the primary domain, causing them to serve the same content. In our case, www.auctioneertech.com and auctioneertech.com are treated the same by our server. However, they don’t have to be. We’re finally to the fun part. Get ready for cake.

Subdomains

Because subdomains are DNS records, they can point to anything. We could, very easily, tell www.auctioneertech.com to serve one page and have auctioneertech.com serve something completely different. It wouldn’t be advisable since it would likely confuse our readers, but we could do it.

Subdomains are free, and we can define an essentially unlimited number of subdomains. For example, to make it easier for our employee users, we could set mail.auctioneertech.com to point to Google Apps so it would show the Gmail login screen. We could make calendar.auctioneertech.com point directly to our company calendar. We could set dev.auctioneertech.com to point to the computer in our living room that’s running a development server so we had a real domain name to use for testing purposes.

Now that we’ve established that subdomains can point anywhere from Google to our living room, let’s look at some specific examples relative to us as auctioneers.

Blogs

We mentioned in our Internet branding series how your blog needs to be located on your website to be properly branded. Some of us, however, don’t have access to our website – or its managed by a third party. Maybe we want to use a different hosting company or allow other users access to the blog while not giving them access to our primary server. In all of these cases, we can use a subdomain to host a blog on one of the many inexpensive providers, while not affecting your primary web host. You could be up and running in under an hour with a starter plan from Lunarpages for $2.95 per month – including an automated WordPress installation. wordpress.com allows subdomain mapping for under $10 per month, allowing you to make your existing blog on wordpress.com look like it’s located natively on your website.

Internet bidding

Maxanet is a popular Internet bidding service that many auctioneers prefer because of its low cost, ease of configuration and private branding abilities. Because it’s a service, it runs on its own servers. Some auctioneers have implemented it through the use of frames, but we’re seeing more and more implementations with subdomains. Subdomains are much better for branding, as we recently discussed in a podcast.

Media hosting

Web hosts have strengths and weaknesses. While there is certainly a positive aspect to using one web host for all our needs, it’s rare that such a service can be found that will do everything we need for under $30 per month. Some hosts pride themselves on speed and reliability. These hosts often charge more or have limits on storage or bandwidth. Other hosts pride themselves on value and offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, but may not be very fast. Subdomains let us use multiple hosts to get the best of both worlds. You can host your primary domain on a server that runs your scripts or houses your bidding, while using a subdomain to host your media. This approach is especially valuable for auctioneers who need to store thousands of pictures for their auctions. If we were running an Internet bidding site, we’d grab an unlimited storage plan from a company like Lunarpages or Bluehost for under $10 per month and put our pictures there, using a subdomain like img.auctioneertech.com as  the way to access them.

Putting it all together

Here’s a real-world example of using multiple servers for an auction company with the domain aaronauction.com. The most important website rule for an auctioneer is to put the auction calendar on the front page. In our example, we’re selecting Maxanet for our Internet bidding and auction calendar management. We’ll house our primary domain, aaronauction.com, as well as the default subdomain, www.aaronauction.com, on the Maxanet servers. This way, Maxanet houses our auction calendar, auctions and Internet bidding from our primary site so our users don’t have additional clicks.

We love WordPress, and it’s going to handle both our blogs as well as all static pages – it truly is a great content management system. We love (mt). The (mt) grid service offers 100 GB of storage for $20. 100 GB isn’t enough to serve as our media warehouse for our years of images and video, but (mt) is super-reliable and will work great to house our WordPress installation. We’ll point web.aaronauction.com there, since it will house all our web pages that aren’t part of Maxanet. It’s also the place we’ll install our bulk email package, phpList.

We’ll need a place to put our pictures. Maxanet doesn’t support storing a ton of content, and our (mt) account is fast and reliable, but won’t be enough storage for us in the long run. We’ll need an unlimited storage solution, and for this need we’ll select Lunarpages at $4.95 per month. As with any cheap, unlimited storage provider, we’ll keep local backups of everything just in case something happens. Should something happen, we’ll be able to put what we need up to (mt) until we find a different host for our media. We’ll point media.aaronauction.com at our Lunarpages account.

Cake

The cake may be a lie, but we’ve got a very robust three-server website, all correctly branded with aaronauction.com. We’re not beholden to any single company, Google Analytics will track all three servers under the same account and our users will neither notice nor care that they’re actually pulling content from three different locations.

Do you have other tricks or tips to using subdomains? Did we bork some of the details about subdomains or zone files? Are you skeptical that a distributed web host system is better than having only one web host? Are you excited about Portal 2, too? Let us know in the comments.

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Today we embark on a three-part series regarding Internet branding. Specifically, we’ll discuss how the choices you make for your domain name, your email address and your blog begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy.

There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site.

Select a .com TLD
A TLD is a top level domain. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with these three TLDs without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in Canada!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and advertising your commercial website, .com is for winners.

Own the domain that matches your company name
“We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well!” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name matches your company.

If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, few will remember it.

Shorter is better
If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if our auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, we would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but we’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, we’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that we’re John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do we look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now we’re getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. Was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? Notice they never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Own your domain name
This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” We really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with us. This exercise is important. Your web host can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

CamelCase isn’t for websites
This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but we feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com is just as valid as AuCtIoNeErTeCh.com. Why don’t we write our website using CamelCase like AuctioneerTech.com since that’s the way it looks in our logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from above – techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

Priorities
In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing most everyone does when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

Back in the days of the FAQ and the image map (remember when you would hover your mouse over a picture and different parts of the graphic would link to different pages?), web designers used a website element known as a sitemap or site index. Modern sitemaps are valuable tools that are submitted to search engines. Sites that still make sitemaps available to the public as navigational elements are behind the times.

When most of us think of a site map, we still think of the link in the footer that takes us to a page that lists all the pages on a site. It used to be the case that sites were so unusable due to browser incompatibilities or lack of developing with web standards that some pages were simply not accessible or not findable by some users without the use of a site map. As such, their use became a trend that in some circles persists to this day.

The problem is that nobody uses them any more. In 2002, a study by useit.com found that 27% of users utilized a site map. That’s a high number, but not when we learn that they were specifically asked to “learn about a site’s structure.” In 2008, the same study found that the number had dropped to 7%.

A user seeing a large list of links isn’t going to have any reference as to the value of those links. Your carefully-designed click-stream, your conversion goals and, most importantly, the user experience are all compromised. Designing using web standards with clear and well-organized navigation that is void of usability land mines such as drop-down menus or Flash navigation will improve accessibility and put the final nail in the coffin of the already-obsolete site map as we know it.

The phrase “as we know it” is important because modern sitemaps are very important for search engine visibility. A sitemap, in the eyes of a search engine, is a carefully crafted XML file that is uploaded or made available on your site. This sitemap has information in it that specifies the page location, the last time the page was modified, how often the page changes and how important the page is. Here’s an example from the official sitemap protocol page at sitemaps.org.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

As you can see, a modern sitemap is nothing like the old sitemaps from when the web was young.

Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools

There are programs that will generate your sitemap for you. They crawl your site and present you with a list of your pages. You then go through these pages and rank them by priority and specify how frequently they change. The program will give you the sitemap file when you can then upload to your favorite search engine. Google’s Webmaster Tools has a Sitemaps section. WordPress and other popular blogging and content management tools have plugins that will automatically generate a sitemap.xml file for your site and submit it to Google. Our AuctioneerTech site map section is shown here.

Don’t let yourself get charged extra for sitemap submission – it’s not an add-on service. Sitemap submission is an integral part of building modern websites and should happen before any website project can be considered complete.

If you’re working with a web developer, make sure he/she is submitting a sitemap.xml file to search engines. Also, don’t forget to make sure that you leave the link list safely in the past where it belongs and off of your public website.

Social networking is one of many buzzwords that has recently risen to fad proportions. It seems that any time the subject of marketing arises, the topic quickly turns to importance of social networking.

The power of social networking lies in the creation of personal relationships. We’ve mentioned before that you should use social networking to increase the social surface area of you, not that of your company or organization. The quickest way to get us to unfollow or leave your group is if you start trying to promote your business instead of simply relating things about you. Solely to illustrate this point, we created our sister site AuctioneerTweet with the only requirement being that the auctioneer accounts must be operated by the auctioneer and the content must not be exclusively about business.

Social networking is powerful. It’s a powerful business tool not because you directly advertise your business, but because you can increase your personal touch. Social networking is dangerous because of its sensationalism. It’s easy to get caught up in thinking that it’s the be-all and end-all to the next generation of marketing.

Social networking may indeed be an important business tool, but it’s not the only business tool that should be used in marketing. We see many auctioneers investing an enormous amount of time in social networking. Some of these auctioneers have bad websites with one or more of the following.

• clashing or obnoxious colors
• fonts of inappropriate sizes
• fonts of inappropriate colors
• difficult-to-find auction calendars that aren’t on the front page
• inappropriate or unprofessional information
• inappropriate Flash elements

We’re not picking on anyone, but your website is the most important marketing tool you have. Your site is more important than social networking by an order of magnitude. One of the benefits of social networking is that essentially every service allows you to enter your website in your profile. If you’re successful in creating a possible business relationship using social networking and that prospective client clicks the link in your profile to a website that isn’t in order, you’re likely to fail in converting that prospect into a client.

Expanding social networking when you have a poor website is a misuse of your resources. It’s like conducting an auction without having a clerking staff in place. We’re not advocating that you stop using social networking until you get a website or get it fixed, but we are pointing out that it’s important to not get caught up in the hype of social networking and place it above other, more obvious priorities.

Have different thoughts about the importance of social networking? Is it ok to have a bad website? Let us know in the comments.

Last week’s post dealt with grokking that there is no functional difference between a minimum or starting bid and a reserve on an item. A post last month pointed out that it’s bad to try to be sneaky when protecting a reserve on an item and that it’s much better to be upfront with the conditions of sale than to try to hide the house’s bidding practices from the other bidders.

Today, we’re going to examine bidding histories, another method of fostering trust between an auctioneer and bidders with regards to Internet bidding. Here’s an example of what we mean.

Bidding history showing the start of bidding to be $1

Internet bidding sites should absolutely allow a prospective bidder to view the previous bids placed on an item. Knowing when these bids were placed and the increments at which they were placed allows the bidder to know what the starting bid was. Knowing who is bidding – the number or username, not the identity – allows the bidder to spot perceived trends in bidding activity. This knowledge prevents an auctioneer or seller from starting the bidding at a low price and then immediately bidding to create an artificial minimum bid for the next real bidder.

We don’t have space to display all 63 bids in the example above, but here’s the finale that shows how the item – which started at $1 above – ended up selling for over $10,000.

Final bidding history showing the final price of an item

Another benefit of making bidding histories available to bidders is that the bid count can be shown in the catalog view. The number of bids shows the level of interest in items and sellers and bidders may be interested to know which items are the most active in an event.

In a live auction, any attending bidder can have access to the bidding history for an item simply by paying attention to the auctioneer. The number of bids and the speed at which they are received arguably builds excitement and can arguably increase the final sales price.

There aren’t any secrets to Internet bidding. Holding a successful auction is more like cooking, where many ingredients are important but different chefs may use different portions at different times to create uniqueness. However, there are ingredients that, if left out, can ruin the project. Internet bidding systems should make items’ bidding histories available to prospective bidders because these histories are a very important ingredient to a successful Internet auction event.

In a March episode of the Auction Podcast, we posited that it is wise to have a policy of starting every item at $10 for Internet bidding.

If your minimum bid at a live auction is $10, set the minimum bid for the Internet bidding to be $10. For every item. For every category from coins to real estate. For every auction. Every time.

The logic, of course, is that it looks suspicious to have starting bids that are anything other than the lowest bid an auctioneer would take at a live auction. If your lowest bid is $5, we reasoned, you should start the Internet bidding at that price since the bidding activity generated by a real auction will quickly advance the bidding to more reasonable prices.

Publications shouldn't try to be auctioneers

In our summer post called Publications shouldn’t try to be auctioneers, we mentioned in passing that Sandhills Publishing – the folks behind TractorHouse, MachineryTrader, TruckPaper and others – completely missed the concept that there isn’t a difference between a high opening bid and a reserve on assets.

Today, we’re going to get right down to the concept that a starting Internet bid is a reserve, plain and simple.

A reserve price is a price below which the seller won’t complete the transaction. An opening bid is a price below which the auctioneer won’t accept bids. A starting Internet bid is a price, entered into bidding software by the auctioneer, that prevents the bidding software from accepting a bid lesser than the starting Internet bid. Some times the software refers to the starting Internet bid as an opening bid, since the two are functionally the same.

If an item is selling at auction, the auctioneer must accept a bid in order to sell it. If the reserve is the lowest price a seller will accept, then all bids below this price are invalid. Because the auctioneer must receive bids to present them to the seller for acceptance, if an opening bid is used then all bids below the opening bid are invalid since the bidders have no way to submit them. Whether the bids are invalid because the seller won’t complete the transaction or the auctioneer won’t accept them doesn’t change the functional equivalence of an opening bid and a reserve from the perspective of the transaction. If it walks like a duck…

So if all opening bids are reserves, are all reserves opening bids? Many times auctioneers allow items with reserves to feature bidding activity below the reserve in hopes that the price will advance beyond the reserve, allowing the transaction to occur. This practice seems a little fundamentally disingenuous to us, but it is quite common in the industry. While many auctioneers are honest and upfront about the reserve status of the items they’re selling, we mentioned in September that there are still auctioneers who try to be sneaky and use house numbers or fictitious bidding accounts to protect the reserves on the items unbeknownst to the bidders. This practice is absolutely not what we’re advocating.

What we are advocating is that auctioneers understand that a minimum bid is functionally no different from a reserve. A starting bid and a reserve both invalidate all lesser bids. A $100 starting bid on a $10,000 vehicle means that the vehicle has a $100 reserve. Such an auction could not honestly and legitimately be referred to or advertised as absolute or without reserve.

Web standards fail

Recent website design work has caused us to do some research into the current design techniques and trends among website authors regarding web stanards. We looked into the definitive guide on the subject, Jeffrey Zeldman‘s Designing with Web Standards, and were excited to find that a third edition is coming this year. While imagining how it would soon sit on the shelf next to the well-read first and second editions, we saw that Amazon had a graphic inviting us to preview part of the book. Click to LOOK INSIDE! it invited.

Shown to the right is the result of clicking to look inside. It shows what happens when you try to deliver content in something other than an open and, dare we say, web-standard method.

Your web browser does not support this feature. Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions for a list of compatible web browsers that support the Amazon Online Reader.

It’ll be a great book. For those curious readers who don’t have one of the previous editions, they’ll have to use a compatible browser to view the preview. It’s too bad that Amazon can’t figure out how to deliver content to everyone. Perhaps their designers might do well to actually read some of the books they’re selling.

If you’re an auctioneer and you’re bidding on behalf of yourself or your seller, there’s nothing illegal about it provided it’s disclosed properly and that it’s not an absolute auction. However, if you’re going to do it, don’t be sneaky about it. Don’t create a fictitious name or bidding account. Don’t try to sneak the disclosure in the small print in the auction terms. Tell your customers what you’re doing and that it’s legal. Tell your customers who you’ve appointed to bid on behalf of the seller. Don’t let your bid-caller bid, and make it clear what’s going on.

True, creating a situation where bidders are competing against a seller or reserve may disappoint or even upset some of them, but they’ll be nothing short of furious if they find out you’re trying to be sneaky in an attempt to keep them from finding out.

Regardless of the legalities of the methods, sneaking around and trying to accept bids that don’t come from legitimate bidders is an easy way to turn your bidders against you.

parts of this post have been removed due to inaccuracies in the original source material

Our friend John Schultz wrote a great blog post this morning about the importance of ensuring that registration requirements were similar for Internet bidders and live bidders. He describes the effect of restricting Internet bidders as follows.

John Schultz

Auction companies need to apply the same set of registration terms to both online and onsite bidders. In fact, approving an online bidder to participate in your auction that has a history of purchasing and paying for items is safer than handing bidding numbers out to anyone that produces a valid photo ID in person. By overly restricting online buyers, auctioneers are dampening the impact online buyers will have on the bottom line of an auction, and are not serving the seller’s best interest.

We completely agree. We’d like to take that thought a step further, however, and say that there should not be a difference in cost between bidding live and using Internet bidding.

Many auctioneers charge a higher buyer’s premium to Internet bidders, usually because there is a sell-through percentage charged to the auctioneer by some Internet bidding providers. The sell-through percentage is a fee charged by some bidding providers that is a percentage of each item sold to Internet buyers. Most auctioneers elect to pass that sell-through percentage on to the buyers.

Here’s the problem. A higher buyer’s premium charged to Internet bidders is absolutely a penalty for placing Internet bids as opposed to placing bids at the auction. The incentive is to not place Internet bids, and the bottom line of the auction suffers.

How, then, can an auctioneer pay for the sell-through percentage charged by the Internet bidding provider if he uses a provider with such a fee structure? Is it simply a cost of doing business like credit card fees? Should it be passed to the seller?

The majority of the costs of conducting an auction are incurred because of the live bidders. The live bidders require bathrooms. The live bidders require labor to clean the auction location. The live bidders require paying a ring staff, bid callers, cashiers – all sorts of expenses that are in addition to and greater than the after-auction labor involved with handling the Internet bidding. With this regard, it absolutely makes sense to increase the buyer’s premium for live customers at least to match that premium incurred by Internet bidders.

Auctioneers who figure out how to make not only buyer registration requirements the same but also make sure that there is no financial penalty for placing Internet bids will see more participation from Internet bidders and do a better job for their sellers.

There are many different approaches to email usage. While some, including John C. Dvorak, say that email is dead, we feel that if used properly email can be a valuable tool and can successfully double as a to-do list.

Google Gmail is superior to any other  email service. The stunning feature set dwarfs other web-based email accounts like Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Hotmail and the use of labels instead of folders, not to mention threaded conversations, makes it better than using simple IMAP and, gods forbid, POP email access. It’s true, Gmail can be accessed using IMAP so that you can use your favorite email client like Outlook or Thunderbird, but they translate the folders that you create in Outlook or Thunderbird into labels.

An email label is more like a tag you affix to a message than a bucket you store the message in. Because of this difference, the same email can have multiple labels. For example, if you have a label for meetings and you go to a meeting about technology, you can label emails related to that meeting as both meetings and technology. Using the old school of thought, you’d have to create folders for meetings and technology and create a copy of the message to place in each folder.

Another concept that Google is famous for pushing everywhere is search. Gone are the days when it took any time at all to locate a message. Simply type a word of the subject or the sender or another recipient in the search box and select from a list of matches.

There is still hope for those of us who are stuck using Outlook for a non-Gmail email experience. The concepts Gmail has taught us about how to work with email more efficiently can be used to help us spend less time managing our email and more time working with the content of that email.

There is some value in the Inbox Zero philosophy, inasmuch as keeping items in your inbox makes it harder to work. We use our inbox as a task list, and as soon as an email is no longer relevant it gets filed away into an addressed folder. Once it’s in that folder, it can be searched very easily using the built-in search function of Outlook which, while not quite as good as Gmail, is very sufficient for day-to-day use.

We’ve seen many email users, however, who needlessly create folders for each person who sends them email and, whether through a need to create busywork or through an overdeveloped sense of diligence, spend minutes each day faithfully dragging from the inbox to the folder that matches the sender. This silly practice generates a bunch of needless folders that makes it actually more difficult to find emails relating to a subject, not to mention wastes time that could be much better spent actually working.

The best and most productive email users keep their inboxes empty and their folder list small. It’s okay to let search manage your email account so you don’t have to.

How do you categorize items in your auctions? Item categorization is an important, though often overlooked and undervalued, part of a marketing strategy. With Internet bidding providers and auction calendars allowing auctioneers to place items in customized categories – and allowing users to navigate directly to those categories – it’s crucial to consider how to maximize the valuable traffic to each item by using categories correctly.

Remember why we have categories
First, let’s think about the reason behind categorization. The theory is that not every user is interested in every asset type. This concept is fairly true, and there is value in allowing users to filter out the uninteresting categories by drilling directly down to categories that interest them. However, the rule is that the more categories you specify for an event, the fewer users will see the items in the event.

Don’t over-categorize
For the same reason it’s a good idea to send your emails out to everyone on your list rather than filtering based on interest, it’s important to try to get all the visitors to your inventory to view every item. It’s impossible to predict when last auction’s coin buyer will be next auction’s real estate buyer. By keeping categories to as low a number as possible – and making sure to always default to an all items view – the number of viewers for each item can be maximized.

Make categories parallel
Categories need to be easy to use and understand. If your event has vehicles, be sure that you don’t have both a cars and automobiles category. Most software allows for items to exist in only one category, and having a general category and a specific sub-category with similar items in each splits your viewers between each. There’s no reason to have categories for tractors and tillage and forage equipment if your farm auction only has one or two of each kind of asset in each category. Breaking up inventory into such small groups only serves to make it harder for users and reduces the viewership for each item.

Tailor categories to the event
A speciality auction and a consignment auction should have very different sets of categories. A consignment auction with firearms has no business with categories for pistols and rifles when a firearms category would ensure that anyone interested in weapons would see all relative items. However, a firearms-only event should indeed have categories for differing kinds of guns.

Categories are bad
In summary, categories are dangerous. If there were no categories, each viewer would browse all items. The more categories in an event, the more broken-up the prospective bidder pool becomes. While it’s intuitive to think that more specificity in categories allows bidders to find items that are more relevant to them, the consequence of this approach is that the benefit of cross-promotion from different asset types is lost.