AuctioneerTech - Auction Podcast

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Friday, 11 December, 2009. auctioneertech.com – technology, auction and auctioneers, auction tech for the auction industry.

Hello and welcome to the 20th episode of the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. My name is Aaron Traffas and today we’re going to talk about the trends and shifts in buyer behavior that find consumers looking for items instead of auctions and what we auctioneers should do about it.

It used to be easy. Bidders used to check the auctions section in the newspaper for something to do on the weekends. We used to put an ad in the classifieds that listed the type of auction we were holding, trusting that the customers wanted to come to the auction. If you hold it, they will come.

Not anymore. Now, instead of looking for auctions to provide needed entertainment and activity, consumers are taking every opportunity to find a gap in their busy schedules that might provide much needed rest. Weekends are for chores and sporting events and movies, not traveling somewhere in hopes that there might be an item of interest that may or may not sell to a competing bidder anyway. Regular consignment auctions everywhere are noticing a decline in physical attendance, and with a few exceptions due to asset type or geography, it’s becoming clear that the interest consumers have in spending hours at auctions is waning.

What does this trend mean for the auction industry? Does it mean we should pack up our gavels and Half Mile Hailers and go home? Of course it doesn’t. It means we must recognize this change in consumer buying habits and adapt. There is still value in the secondary market. Consumers are no longer looking for auctions, they’re looking for items and they don’t really care how the items are sold. If we present better information about the items to the prospective bidders, they’ll make the effort to make the purchase.

An auction event is a collection of auction items. We auctioneers realize this marketing tactic, and it’s what sets us apart from other one-off competitive bidding sites like eBay. It allows us to more effectively advertise and use economics of scale to keep our costs down and to  do a better job for our sellers. What we need to understand and respect is that we must be more granular in our advertising and extend past the event and down to the item level.

The Internet is the obvious answer as a mechanism to list the items at our auctions. Since traditional media is becoming more expensive and less effective every day, our efforts should be focused towards driving customers from our traditional advertisements to our websites. Only there do we have the ability to convey the amount of information at essentially no cost to our clients.

What kind of information should we present and how should we present it?

Descriptions
The more information we convey, the better we can serve our bidders. Aspects such as year, make, model, style, color and condition are obvious components to a good description. If you list an item and someone asks a question about it, use that question as a tip to add the answer to the description so the next possible bidder won’t have to ask the same question.

Pictures
Digital cameras are cheap, and so is the film. A big memory stick and some freely-available picture processing software makes it amazingly easy to present many pictures of each item.

Sale order
Consumers don’t want to wait. While you don’t have to know the exact minute an item will sell, publishing a sale order on your website will let a bidder know when he’ll need to be at the auction or, in the case of Internet bidding, in front of his computer. Provide a sale order and don’t break from it.

While our websites are the most important places to present all of this information, they are not only places we should post our items. Internet auction calendars such as the National Auctioneers Association’s auction calendar, Global Auction Guide, the National Auction List and AuctionZip provide free or inexpensive venues to list our items. Craigslist, niche forums and bulletin boards are other places that may take a little more work but may generate a significant benefit for our sellers and our bottom lines.

The amount of information we can convey about each item is substantial. The more details we post for each item on our websites and those sites listed above, the more likely consumers are going to be able to find our items through auction- and non-auction search channels. If a consumer looks for an item using Google and we’ve posted that item on multiple websites with a link back to the auction listing on our site, that consumer is more likely to find our item and participate in our auction. If the item isn’t listed in the auction description, the consumer won’t know about it and will make a purchase from somewhere else.

It sounds like a lot of work. We can’t simply string out the items in a windrow on the lawn on the morning of the auction. Picturing, cataloging, data entry and item-level marketing are all important but labor-intensive and expensive components to modern auction preparation.

Buyers are looking for items. Our sellers are looking for buyers. Technology gives us new ways to advertise items to buyers for our sellers. The next generation of successful auctioneers isn’t going to be successful because those auctioneers have the best chant or the longest company histories . They’re going to be successful because they’ve figured out the most efficient workflow to present the most information in the most places about each individual item they’re selling.

That’s it for episode 20. Have a happy holiday season from AuctioneerTech and we’ll see you in 2010 with more episodes, interviews and the continuation of our video podcast series.

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.

an auction calendar should be compact, clean and simple, conveying the important information as well as a selection of thumbnails highlighting the best merchandise for each event

I’ve seen many auction websites. I’ve seen good sites and bad sites. I’ve seen pretty sites and ugly sites. The good and the pretty aren’t usually the same sites. Some of the most attractive websites I’ve seen are some of the worst functioning websites. Some of the best auction websites look hideous. While it’s important to have both institutional marketing and event marketing materials on our website, many auctioneers make what I believe to be a mistake and prioritize the institutional materials. This practice comes many times at the expense of the one feature of the sites that I would consider to be good sites, which is a prominently-placed auction calendar on the front page.

In order to build a functionally good website, we have to make correct assumptions about our users. Who are they? What are they looking for? Most of the users of auction websites are prospective bidders looking for items in auctions and are probably not interested in the history or abilities of the auctioneer. Any content or navigation that comes between the user and the items in the auctions is a possible reason for the user to look elsewhere.

The minority of users are prospective sellers looking for information about the auction company. The best way for us to make an impression on a prospective seller is to show him or her the great job we’re doing marketing what others are currently selling or what we’ve sold for others in the past. If they see what the auctioneer is doing and has done and are impressed, they’re going to make the effort to find the links that lead them to the information about the auctioneer.

For these reasons, it’s crucial that we place our auction calendars on the front pages of our sites. If there are only one or two auctions coming up, those should be listed first the past auctions and realized prices listed below in descending order. We’re marketers, first and foremost, and what better marketing opportunity than to display the items we’re selling to the traffic on our website. Many of the better auction calendars make use of a number of thumbnails to give the user a feel for the kind of assets in an event without the user even having to click on the auction. For example, instead of simply listing an auction with a representative picture of one item and the auction title, why not list small pictures of two combines, a tractor, and a couple of implements as well? The user will have a better impression of the contents of the event and will hopefully be more compelled to learn more about the event.

WalMart doesn’t have their corporate information listed first on walmart.com. They sell items, so that’s what they assume customers want. We auctioneers sell items in auctions, so it’s important that we realize that customers want to see auctions when they come to our sites. Sellers will find the information they’re after. Buyers will simply find another site if they have to work to find our auction calendar.