Use Google Docs for simple web forms

Lunarpages is a company that offers very robust and generous website hosting plans. Their control panel is easy to use and automates the installation of many popular scripts such as WordPress, Drupal, etc.

One of their value-added services is a monthly newsletter that they send out to their customers. The most recent issue discusses using Google Docs to easily create a simple web contact form. It may be worth your while if you’re looking for an easy way to allow customers to submit information on your website.

http://www.web-hosting-newsletter.com/2008/11/26/use-google-docs-to-create-a-form/

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Black Friday auction – holiday auctions unwise without Internet bidding

An auctioneer and her assistants scan the crow...

Image via Wikipedia

Seasonality is the curse of all auctioneers. Even auctioneers in roughly the same geographic area can have consistent yearly downturns during several months each year. The goal is to manage those downturns so that cash flow remains as steady as possible.

One tempting solution used by many auctioneers is to hold events on or near holidays and market them as a special opportunity. I’ve been involved with auctions on labor day and memorial day, though I’ve always questioned whether our crowd might have been better had we held the auction during the week rather than on a weekend where many consumers have plans centered on relaxation and recreation rather than shopping.

Pre-auction only Internet bidding mitigates the importance of scheduling an event around the varying schedules of expected auction participants and Internet only bidding eliminates it. However, I’ve seen a few auctioneers holding auctions without Internet bidding of any kind on this coming Black Friday.

It’s my guess that auctions of items that are gift items or personal items – furniture, electronics, appliances, antiques – may come up short in the holiday months with the stiff competition with retail stores eager to make the sale at all costs. Commercial assets should hold strong, as business decisions are usually more immune to the impulse-purchase-affected, constantly-fluctuating disposable cash-on-hand levels associated with gift shopping.

I think the best thing an auctioneer can do is to save the gift items from the live crowd on Black Friday and, instead, hold an Internet only auction on Cyber Monday when everyone is going to be looking to the Internet for the remaining gifts that they need to complete their holiday portfolio.

Do you believe holding auctions on or around holidays improves attendance? Are people willing to spend more at auction during the holiday shopping season? How can you effectively compete against the retail establishment on the one day of the year when they take no prisoners? Let us know in the comments.

If you’re holding an auction on Black Friday and wish to advertise it using guerrilla marketing tactics, please leave a link to your auction in the comments.

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Additional RFP points

Rob Spectre left the following as a comment to yesterday’s article on the example RFP. It’s so good it deserves its own post. You can view his Gonzo blog at www.dreamnotoftoday.com.

1) Require a submitted portfolio with references. Five sites with traffic levels doing more than 40k monthly uniques you can verify with independent services like Compete or Quantcast with a good sprinkling of both technical and business contacts.

2) Always have a MSA, SoW, and SLA. The first is the Master Services Agreement (MSA) and contains the general terms of the contract with appropriate indemnification, jurisdiction, and penalties for breach. Second is the Statement of Work (SoW) which serves as the gospel for the project; the full list of all deliverables, their delivery dates, and the delivery acceptance terms. Finally, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) contains the specific terms governing support. These three documents serve as the context for a successful relationship and ensure all the sticking points in a web dev project are clearly defined before it is engaged.

3) The right partner is more important than your tech organization’s favorite scripting language. Java, PHP, Python, and Flash all have standard best practices surrounding their implementation on the modern web and have examples of very high scale. More important than the language is the ability to deliver on time and provide consistent support after launch. A vendor insisting on Ruby on Rails with a 24/7 support line is infinitely more valuable than a vendor with the most elegant PHP yet written who is chronically unavailable on weekend / holiday outages.

4) The site must have comprehensive web analytics support. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Whatever your analytics package of choice (Google, Omniture, WebTrends, awStats, etc), be sure the SoW includes a *full* integration beyond a little javascript cookie in the footer of each page. Before you launch, you must be able to verify full path segmentation, defined funnels for each of your goal pipelines, and being able to track each visitor’s conversion to both the lead *and* the sale.

We’ll be adding this content to the RFP when we add it to the resources page in a few weeks after all suggestions are in.

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Example RFP for new or redesigned website

I’ve spoken with many auctioneers recently who are at the beginning stages of a new technology project, usually a website redesign or new build of some kind. The questions everyone asks mostly revolve around the expectations they should have of the person or company being hired to build the website.

Website mockup example

A mockup is essential to give to your provider – don’t let the provider design the site

I’ve put together some content that I consider important to include in an RFP – request for proposal. It’s by no means exhaustive, and at least some parts of it will have to be changed for every application, but it’s a start to a baseline set of what I believe to be good standard practices when entering into a relationship with a service provider. For the purposes of this post, buyer is auctioneer, seller is service provider, employee is a backend user and user is frontend user. We’re going to assume that the buyer will provide a mock-up created by a designer. This mock-up would show exactly the layout and presentation requested by the buyer so that all the seller has to do is build the site using web standards. This draft assumes that your provider will install the website on a purchased or rented server controlled by the buyer. It assumes that the buyer has an email list system – I recommend phpList – and wants ownership of the auction calendar as opposed to using a third party’s auction calendar like that from Auction Services or AuctionZIP. I’m neither endorsing nor recommending against either of those popular auction website providers, I’m merely giving an example of a possible permutation. Perhaps a third party calendar is desired, as well as housing the site on the seller’s servers. Each auctioneer’s needs and desires are different. I’ve intentionally tried to stay away from most functional pieces of a good website and focus instead on the deliverables and legal requirements that should set the ground rules of a work for hire.

Website must include a calendar system that will facilitate easy creation and display of auction title, date, time, location and thumbnail images. Frontend layout is provided by attached mock-up. Backend must allow upload of images, auction event creation and modification and be available only over secure connection. Seller must install security certificate on buyer’s environment if it doesn’t already exist. Backend login must be employee-specific with ability to grant access to various resources to various employees.

Email subscription form must allow direct subscription ability and integration with a bulk email list management system such as phpList or Intersend.

Sales lead generation form must email leads to email address or addresses as specified by buyer or employees in the backend.

In order to anticipate future browser compatibility we require conformance to the following W3C standards.

  1. Markup must validate to the W3C’s XHTML 1.1 doctype at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/
  2. Style sheets must validate to the W3C’s CSS 2.1 format at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
  3. Javascript will never use browser detection but instead object detection to test for browser support of properties, arrays and methods.
  4. Site must not use tables for layout purposes. Tables will only be used for tabular data.
  5. Website must be tested to display similarly in current and the last major release of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, Konqurer, and Google Chrome on stock installations of Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Apple OS X and Ubuntu Linux where each browser is available on each operating system, as well as Internet Explorer 5 and 6.

Deliverables:

  1. All deliverables must be installed by seller on buyer’s environment.
  2. All deliverables will be considered “work made for hire” under U.S. Copyright law. Buyer will receive exclusive and complete copyrights to all work purchased. Any use of open-source content must be expressly defined and agreed to by buyer before implementation.
  3. No dependence on outside services is allowed. The website must function completely and independently of any third party site, service or server, unless expressly permitted by buyer.
  4. Seller will have no rights to use, reproduce or access any content, materials or other information stored on the website, including but not limited to form submission, customer information, email addresses, sales data and account records.
  5. Work must be original and not based on existing templates or previously-constructed components used by other customers of the seller.

Successful proposal will include the following components.

  1. Bid for construction of website using web standards with layout defined by provided mock-up and functionality defined above. This construction must include documentation and training sufficient for buyer to understand and operate site completely and effectively.
  2. Estimate of time to completion as well as financial implications of delays should they occur due to additional requests made by buyer or developmental hardships experienced by seller.
  3. Bid for continued ad-hoc support and maintenance on an hourly basis. Support must be provided by website creator if that person is different from seller.
  4. List of hours with guaranteed availability for support.
  5. List of five websites created by seller and contact information of website owners to serve as list of references.

Now, I realize that this draft is very strict. Some providers may balk completely, and some that don’t balk may intentionally price themselves out of the competition because, like using perfect English, using web standards is hard for some. Hopefully, however, this example may serve as a valuable starting point for someone looking to start from scratch. Compromises may be desired on certain parts, like XHTML validation, but an auctioneer should always retain the rights to your data (deliverable 4) and be sure that the provider will support the product after it’s built. Above all, be sure to have a very clearly-defined, counsel-approved contract that you can use to hold the service provider accountable should you believe that the work is incomplete or incorrect. Writing an example RFP was requested by many. These are some of my ideas. Do you have a must-have condition for the work that you hire done? Leave a comment so we can build on this document and add it to the resources page.

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Auction Podcast Episode 12 – If you ship, you fail

This Ford cutaway van chassis has a delivery t...

Image via Wikipedia

Hello and welcome to the twelfth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast for the week of 17 November 2008. My name is Aaron Traffas, and now that I’ve baited you with the catchy and possibly controversial title, lets examine the importance of local marketing as it relates to Internet bidding as well as a couple of shipping options if you find yourself in a situation where local marketing has failed and you must convey an asset to someone else who can’t make it in to pick it up.

Many auctioneers who turn to Internet marketing, especially Internet bidding, have the expectation that the items will sell to a foreign bidder, and for the purposes of this netcast we’re going to use foreign to mean someone outside of regular driving distance, perhaps even out of state or out of the country. While it’s possible to construct an advertising campaign that will accomplish this goal of selling items to foreign bidders, a much smarter play is to advertise locally first.

Let’s use the example I used in Auction Podcast Episode 2. If a car is worth $1000 and someone from another state has to spend $200 in time and fuel to come get it, he’ll only spend $800 at the auction. Someone across the street can bid the true $1000 because there’s not really any cost associated with item acquisition.

The ability for an Internet bidder to come in and pick up the asset from the auctioneer or the auction location is worth a lot. Part of the reason we see declining attendance at auctions, as well as a continued decline with eBay’s auctions section, is that people don’t want to wait. If I place a bid on item and wait for it to sell and then have to wait for the auctioneer or his agent to pack it and ship it to me, I’ve done a whole lot of waiting by the time I finally get the item.

However, if I’m a bidder and the advertising for a local event with Internet bidding has made me aware of an item in which I’m interested, I’m still probably not going to go to the auction, but I’m willing to bid more if I can go get the item immediately once I’ve been declared the winner.

I will concede that there are some niche asset types that have such a small or geographically foreign prospective buyer pool to which my examples and principals here aren’t applicable. Take, for example, the 40 Years of Star Trek auction that was conducted by Christie’s a few years ago. Because Trekkers are so geographically diverse, the global Internet marketing was crucial for the success of this event. Another example of the importance of global niche marketing can be found in some of the antique tractor auctions conducted by Aumann Auctions. The buyer market for antique tractors is so small and spread out that many times the only buyers who are willing to pay fair market value for the antique tractors are from far away. Without the global marketing, the tractors would sell for a much lower price because there probably aren’t very many serious antique tractor collectors in the greater Nokomis metropaulatin area.

The point is that its much better to use your Internet bidding as an option to entice local bidders to participate. Advertise to your local buyer base first if the items you’re selling are appropriate, because that local buyer base doesn’t have the costs of time, fuel and/or shipping that someone from far away will incur.

If you do have a high sell-through rate to foreign buyers, there is still an argument to be made as to whether to pack and ship the items yourself or turn to a third party such as the local UPS Store. Many auctioneers outsource the shipping, arguing that an auctioneer’s best time is best spent landing sales and working for his sellers. Some auctioneers have elected to hire additional staff and operate a shipping division, turning it into a proffit center. In either case, there are a couple of companies worth noting that can ease the pain of shipping larger items.

Navis at gonavis.com specializes in difficult-to-ship items like furniture and powersports. They have the ability to crate and palletize the items for you, so it essentially becomes a turn-key operation.

Uship at uship.com is an interesting business model that merges a reverse auction with the classic load-finding trucking dispatch service. They allow shippers – either auctioneers or bidders – to post loads that are bid on by service providers – trucking companies. They have an eBay-style feedback system for both shippers and service providers. They offer revenue sharing for their partners and they make it easy to include a widget on your website to allow prospective bidders to get their own shipping quotes based on average costs for like-kind items shipped similar distances at similar times.

Well that’s it for episode twelve. The last two episodes have been fairly short, but don’t worry. We’ve got some exciting interviews in the months ahead.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

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