Today, for a business to beat the competition and achieve great success, e-auction and bidding play a vital role. It benefits both buyers as well as suppliers by streamlining the procurement process. It also saves time and allows smaller businesses to compete in the process.
The availabilities of the internet among people have clearly given a great advantage to the e-auction portals. As a result, online auction platforms have made everything possible such as reaching out to the most number of buyers to selling different assets for the best prices in the shortest time.
These platforms are always required to stand at the forefront to offer full-fledged solutions to their clients besides trust, reliability, integrity, transparency, and satisfaction.
One such leading platform in the online auction and bidding space is MaxSold. With an ambition to empower buyers and sellers to extend the life of things for new generations to love, Barry Gordon founded MaxSold.
MaxSold is evolved from a 50-year auction legacy. It firmly believes that sellers deserve transparency, ease of use, and profitability. The company also has a point of view that sellers should not have to be a technology expert, marketing expert, or logistics expert to sell their goods.
Eventually, consignment shops, antique stores, estate buyers, and many ‘estate sale’ companies use MaxSold regularly to sell extra products, thereby providing a mix of options for buyers and sellers.
In the following interview with Insights Success, Barry Gordon, the Founder, sheds light on the company’s journey, the current industry scenario, and his vision for the company’s future.
Please describe MaxSold in detail.
MaxSold’s purpose is to empower buyers and sellers to extend the life of things for new generations to love. MaxSold solutions leverage technology to bring the benefits of an auction marketplace to homeowners when they go to downsize or have an estate to settle.
As the value of household contents declined and the cost of providing professional solutions increased, homeowners faced poor alternatives to clear the goods that often missed out on value, pushed too much into landfills, and were vulnerable to security issues.
By reinventing both auctions and estate sales with a tech-enabled platform, anyone with a volume of goods to clear can enjoy a competitive, transparent, safe, and finite way to capture something for everything and virtually avoid the cost of disposal personally and to the environment.
Tell us about the featured person(s) and shed some light on their professional journey in the auction and bidding niche.
Barry Gordon, the Founder, is a second-generation auctioneer with 45 years of evolving industry experience selling everything from livestock to houses and everything in between. His experience also included being on the National Auctioneers Association and Auction Marketing Institute boards and getting to know professionals throughout the industry.
Knowing what others did, helped reveal what they did not. There was a significant and growing gap in the marketplace where average estate and downsize homeowners were being abandoned by the auction industry for economic reasons.
5% of estates have the kind of merchandise most auctioneers can afford to serve other than a few valuable pieces. The other 95% need a relevant solution that will gladly sell everything in their home- and that is why MaxSold exists.
What were the initial challenges that MaxSold had to overcome, and how did you pivot those?
The challenge from the beginning was to figure out how to deliver the benefits of online auction at scale, so it would be economical enough for everybody with a volume of goods a bit of time to use. Event auctions generally require a high dollar value threshold to finance the work that takes place. Building for and at scale makes MaxSold a practical solution for the largest portion of the marketplace.
At the same time, every seller wants their goods to have a good bidding audience, so investing in buyer marketing needs to lead to the actual income obtainable through commissions and fees.
Auctioneers always faced the challenge of attracting both buyers and sellers but building a solid product across wide geography with very tight margins meant selecting markets, building momentum in those markets, simply saying no to some until later. MaxSold will serve every market in North America eventually, but the journey requires the discipline to build on a schedule.
What was your inspiration behind venturing into the auction and bidding space?
MaxSold evolved from a 50-year auction legacy that started at the live auction and after testing all the hybrid options before settling into the most relevant way for estate and downsized clients to clear their goods.
Online auctions, almost exclusively, began as item auctions – like eBay, where people sold one item at a time and shipped it to the buyer. As bandwidth increased, live auctions – where most ‘real auction’ merchandise was sold began to partner with online so local merchandise could be sold in front of a live bidding audience and simultaneously through internet bidding.
And while this process remains prevalent, it really doesn’t help the average homeowner. The best buyer for your grandmother’s teak dining set probably lives down the street rather than across the country. We wanted to build a product that simply allowed everyone to sell all their home contents fairly and quickly, so the house could be empty when the buyer moves in. Everything, from the lawnmower to the sterling silver, to those collectibles, can and is sold daily through MaxSold.
What is the current scenario of the auction and bidding market?
People gain more comfort in online shopping and the wide range of alternative platforms every day. This trend will continue for every kind of merchandise. Buyers gain confidence and preference in one or more brands based on the relevance of that brand to the customer’s needs, and the brand’s ability to evolve with demand for frictionless commerce from their preferred brands.
MaxSold connects previously enjoyed items directly from the client’s home to the buyer, at the buyer’s price! As MaxSold builds out a marketplace, buyers become sellers too.
COVID has accelerated the online marketplace by forcing people to shop more from home. Online auctions easily evolved into safer pickup protocols than live events while allowing contents to flow into the community throughout our robust housing markets. As a result, online auctions have become ubiquitous across North America, if not the globe.
What can equipment buyers do to ensure proper preparation for bidding at an auction?
While MaxSold has a very small footprint in the equipment world, all auction buyers want good reliable photos and descriptions commensurate with the value of the product. Every auction platform needs to cultivate a relationship where buyers can become comfortable with the descriptions so they can decide confidently how much they are prepared to pay.
What is your opinion on the adoption of modern technologies in the auction and bidding sector, and how is your company leveraging these modern technologies?
Tech evolves daily, and online auctions must remain current in the race to bring ease of experience to customers and clients alike. MaxSold enjoys diverse investor support and a board and CEO with broad expertise in online commerce, so understanding what’s next and being able to fund the appropriate development and integrations are always on the radar.
Big tech companies are continually raising the bar on customer convenience, which requires all players to be engaged in creating a great customer experience.
What would you like to advise the budding aspirants who are willing to enter the auction and bidding niche?
Specialize in something and serve the customers and marketplace well. Product experts can easily take their knowledge online and use the platform to develop their own marketplace.
Being ethical and committed to transparency are staples in an unregulated industry. They also need to understand that the auctioneer must always attract both sellers and buyers in order to be successful.
