Proxibid’s rollouts, officially announced today, include new category landing pages like this one, for coins and currency. Screenshot from proxibid.com.
It may not enable users to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but the bundle of upgrades — internally nicknamed “Project Superman” — announced today by Proxibid will provide what the company is touting as “the most user-friendly and secure online bidding experience available” and marks the largest product upgrade to date for Proxibid, an Omaha-based real auction marketplace.
Some 20 new features and enhancements were presented as part of the upgrades, more mundanely referred to as Proxibid’s Q3 product rollout. The rollout includes: a newly designed website; additional category landing pages; more efficient fraud prevention measures; better-streamlined registration and bidding processes; and tools to make it easier for users to browse for and find auctions.
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“That was an incredibly difficult release that went exceptionally well,” Proxibid president Ryan Downs (left, photo courtesy of Proxibid) said last week of the rollout, which took place Aug. 22 but wasn’t widely publicized until today. “We changed almost everything on that site … so that’s a very compelling story when it comes to the amount of innovation we introduced to the market.”
Proxibid decided to embark on the project at the end of April, making for an intense development process leading up to last month’s release. “About 3.5 months (of preparation), and it was probably three years worth of development work,” Michael Stinger, Proxibid’s director of software development, said before reconsidering. “I won’t say it was that much, but … at least 90 percent of all our code base had some form of change in it.”
The Aug. 22 rollout marked the second phase of a larger series of upgrades by Proxibid that started with the release of Bidder App in July. The decision to make the upgrades arose, in part, because of surveys conducted last year that indicated Proxibid users had trouble registering for and entering auctions.
“We wanted to remove that barrier of registration,” product manager and co-founder Andy Liakos said, “and still provide the security for the auction company and providing the auction company all the information that they need from the bidder to allow that bidder into their auction.”
The changes, the Proxibid team says, have begun to help achieve those aims. A simplified registration and login process has led to fewer support calls. An in-auction experience that involves fewer pages has helped reduce the user drop-off rate – think of the it as Proxibid’s version of Amazon’s “one-click” buying experience.
“That was an incredibly difficult release that went exceptionally well. We changed almost everything on that site.”
– Proxibid president Ryan Downs
Jason Nielsen, Proxibid’s vice president of risk management and payments, said the improved user experience for bidders is expected to pay dividends for auctioneers, too, in the form of more people bidding on items.
“One of the things that we get asked a lot is, ‘Are you on the auctioneers’ side, or are you on the bidders’ side?’ ” Nielsen said. “And, you know, for us, we’re actually in the middle.
“This isn’t about taking sides. It’s about making sure that marketplace is as efficient and as pure as you can make it.”
Auction companies will have access to more tools the help them to be even more strategic in their business. Proxibid’s new auction dashboard provides auctioneers with access to more data to track and analyze online auction results. Cumulative performance metrics and updated auction summary statistics provided in the dashboard are designed to help auction companies plan strategically for upcoming auctions and offer the statistical information to aid in securing high-profile consignments. Auction companies also have access to more advertising and marketing opportunities, enabling additional opportunities to drive bidders to their events.
“All of the products introduced in this launch serve one goal – to dramatically improve the user experience on our site,” Downs said. “Months of research, development and quality assurance testing went into this product roll-out. I am confident that no other provider in the industry has the capability to deliver a suite of products as sophisticated as the one we just released.”
For a behind-the-scenes look at the Project Superman rollout, see the video below, by Proxibid video editor Paige Stark.
Video from Proxibid on YouTube
