Extracting more value from holding clearing sales online

By Dwain Duxson - Farm Tender

Our own eyes were opened during the week just gone.

We held our first ever Single Vendor Farm Tender Auctions online clearing sale. We have been doing online Auctions for about 12 months now, and some have been successful and some not so. In our first-ever auction, our system crashed with 12 minutes to go. How do you think that went down.

But this week a couple from Central NSW entrusted the Robbie McKenzie led team at Farm Tender Auctions to do their clearing sale knowing it has some risk attached to it.

So kudos to them, and sometimes with risk comes reward, and in this case, there were rewarded.

Not going into specific figures but they were budgeting for $300,000, and we got them north of $460,000. That’s what's called adding value.

We, at Farm Tender, have been doing this online stuff for ten years now and all our staff work from home but this sale still surprised us. It opened our eyes.

There are a fair few positives with this type of format, especially when you combine two of the largest online audiences in the Agriculture space, Farm Tender and Auctionsplus.

For this particular auction, we had 15,460 views, and at the 8 pm close we still had 170 active bidders. This meant the sale went for another 37 minutes past the official close time, apparently a record for Auctionsplus.

The positives are:

1. Combining the local audience with a national online audience
2. Combining the online audience of Farm Tender (165,000 Unique Monthly Visitors) and Auctionsplus (136,000 UMV)
3. More onlookers, means more bids, more urgency and greater atmosphere
4. Low selling commission rates of 4% (plus a 2% buyers premium)
5. If something doesn’t sell, then we have a backup selling platform (Farm Tender)
6. Online, means you can bid from anywhere
7. Using trusted online platforms that have been around for years and have real people you can talk too.

The real power I see here is the audience size; tradition clearing sales attract locals and a few outsiders. Online clearing sales still attract the local audience, but add the much larger online audience.

Many took up the option of the inspection days, but many didn’t and trusted the system. Is it perfect? No, but we are going to get it pretty right most of the time because we want to do it again and again.

It also helps when the vendors cooperate; these guys were awesome to work with.

They sent me a text this morning - Hi Dwain. WOW