In our quest to have the perfect auction we are exploring a number of auctioneer technologies. We don’t want to be an auction company, not that auctions are not part of the plan but future events will dictate how much time, money and effort that we wish to expend. To that end we have decided on a possible goal of 1 site per day but we are going to try it with 2, the premise being that with technology thinks are often good for 1 but not more than 1 and often if they are good for 2 then they are also good for up to 64,000 at least. Perhaps a different way of saying that would be that we decided to use a “scalable” auctioneering solution even if we eventually decided to do just 1 a day.

One problem with software is that there isn’t much of a personal touch. Our goal is to promote an association of geogeneric domain owners and we think that there ought to be as much of a personal element as possible to initial attract them and that we should continually demonstrate the willingness to include a personal element to our endeavors. Future personal communications will be easier if there is the ability to use the software necessary for audio-video capability and so we think it would be nice to demonstrate our ability by including this personal aspect where we can and in this case that means our auctions.

A personal aspect to a live auction would be using a live auctioneer. We don’t think that it is necessary to have audio/video display of the bidders but that might be nice. There are a few things to be considered but the first one is that if you have a live auctioneer and the potential of live bidders then there needs to be some time element consideration. BIDO.com has 1 hour auctions which seems OK by us but our live auctioneer may find in a tad boring and difficult to keep up the banter with any enthusiasm.

We are hoping to attract the end-user and getting them together at an auction may be a problem. We’ll work on making it as little of a problem as possible but we are taking that into consideration. There has to be a specified window of time that a person can log in and make their bid even if they don’t take part in the live aspect of it. Additionally, we are planning on starting off with 2 auctions a day and at that point we need to consider whether there would be 2 auctions at the same time or one at some point after the other. We feel it wise to have a specific ending time so that someone can schedule the time to bid, always remembering that we are trying to accomodate the end user, not the domainer.

We are operating with an assumption that the auctions will be at the same time every day - other possibilities exist since by their very definition the domains they represent are associated with different time zones. It might be wise to have 2 a day, 1 at some hour suitable for west coast and 1 at a suitable east coast time. A particular generic might be better suited for a later auction as well, or earlier, and the option of using a more appropriate time is attractive.

The option of 2 at once is sort of attractive as well. Less time for the auctioneer to make conversation. We think it very important to have a definite ending time. Also important is to have an exciting and stimulating process that encourages the proper bidder to be motivated to win the auction. Our idea of the proper winning bidder is not exactly the one who was willing to pay the most just because of the domain name but the one who saw the potential in the domain name when associated with other geo-genericists and so was willing to pay a little more than the domain name itself was worth in order to get the immediate value that their association with us brings. Almost a rebate.

So the current plan is to have 2 auctions a day, perhaps 8 hours apart. Each auction will be 1 hour long with a live auctioneer and perhaps an accompanying discussion panel that both encourages the bidding and discusses the merits of association with Associated Geo-Generics Dot Com. Ideally these auctions would be recorded so that the opinions expressed by the auctioneer and the discussion panel could be further used for upcoming promotions and end-user education which might be the same thing.

The problem will be finding the auctioneer and panel - even finding them will be tough let alone figuring out how much to pay them. Even just an auctioneer is a task to find. It is certainly a harder job to fill than getting someone to just watch the computer for you to make sure your software doesn’t crash. If each auction is 1 hour then that is 2 hours a day. Hard to come up with fresh content but who knows, maybe there are a couple of aspiring actors who could use $40 dollars a day working from their dorm room. Maybe they could read pertinent news from websites while they wait for bids. The pre-auction end-user attaining task ought to provide enough content to fill an hour for each domain. Eventually the actors would have to learn something and maybe if they could inject a little of their own personality into the role of auctioneer they could further their off-auction career.

There isn’t all that much time to figure it out - I guess it depends on what the bids and sale prices are like. Perhaps if a domain could be sold for $50 dollars more by including the personal aspects it will be an easy decision to continue having live auctions. Eventually we might sell more domains per day but initially we are providing the stock of domains necessary to test our auctioning abilities over a period of time - 2 months, 100 domains. If we can obtain a good price for the domains that we sell then we will start selling other peoples’ domains and charge some amount of money for our efforts. Since we have the overall goal of using the auctions to assist end-users that see the value in joining our association of geo-generics we don’t even need to make money on the auctions. A selling commission that was whatever our talented auctioneers get paid might be the extent of what we charge, assuming that there becomes no need for us to expend money or effort to attract end-users to our auctions because all end-users have become aware of us.

The next issue is that of the payment for and transfer of the domains sold at auction. Included are the subproblems like registration of bidders, taking credit cards, etc. Discussed in an upcoming post.