blog.wholesalecentral.com recently had the opportunity to speak with Wayne Peckham, one of the nation’s leading online electronics auctioneers, about the recent updates and changes to his web presence. Recently, Peckham launched his very own auction site, awsurplusauction.com, and was kind enough to go over the changes with us, as well as the benefits and disadvantages of running his own site.
blog.wholesalecentral.com: What’s different about the site now as compared to before?
Wayne Peckham: We were going through an outside source for webcasting our auctions, but now we’ve had our own built by another company, so it’s our own actual auction website. The benefit is we have more control, the customers dont have to search. Before, when we sent our customers to the outside auction source to look for our auctions on their website, they had to search for us. On our own auction site, they find our auction instantly. It’s all our stuff.
IR.com: How has it been working out so far?
WP: It’s only been two auctions, so we’re still in transition. We do auctions every Wednesday, every week, and we do big auctions, about 900 lots. We sell about three to four truckloads every single week at the auction. Not everybody bids every week. Some people miss a couple of weeks. So it’s been a transition. People are going to look for us on our old site, we’re not there, then they’re calling and emailing, asking what happened to us. That’s why I’m doing these ads and emails, to let my customers know. We email everybody, but you know how that is. With newsletter emails, people tend to ignore it. So we try different things. It’ll just take time, and we know that. I figure in a couple months, my site will be bigger and better than what it was on the other one.
IR.com: How long has the change been in effect?
WP: It’s been only a couple of weeks. I have customers that like the simpicitiy of the site, they like the fact that they dont have to search for us, whereas on the other site, they were running 100 different auctions, and customers had to try and find me in the list. Now it’s just me, so it’s simple.
IR.com: What’s been the biggest challenge so far?
WP: The biggest challenge of course, is that because the other site had hundreds of different auctions, you reap the benefit of other auctioneers sending people to that site, where they also see yours, too. Also, the auction website host company is giving free advertisement. We’re losing that, but we’re gaining 100 percent control. When we were dealing with this other place, we had to pretty much go by their guidelines, and being as they’re more of a web host company, they don’t understand the auction process as well, which was causing conflicts.
IR.com: So the benefits outweigh any disadvantages.
WP: In two or three months, once any of the bugs are worked out on the new site, all customers are in and we get everybody going again, everybody’s going to love it better. We’ll continue to grow. From the first auction, we had a little over 100 people; second auction, we had a little over 200 people. So we’re almost back up to where we were in full on the other site. We were around 250, so we’re only about 50 people shy of that.
IR.com: What else would you like our readers to know about A&W Surplus?
WP: A&W Surplus has its own auction website now, and while it’s still a work in progress, changing our website is helping us grow. Realistically, in the last year and a half, we’ve actually doubled our growth. I used to do auctions every two weeks, now we do them every week, and we’re still not keeping up with all the merchandise that all these companies are sending us.
Contact:
A&W Surplus
3330 North Duke Ave.
Fresno, CA 93727
Ph: 559-348-9428
Website: awsurplusauction.com