Yahoo Autos Bring a Trailer Adds 'Best Offer' Feature When the Auction Reserve Isn't Met
The Bring a Trailer online auction site is changing the way it handles things when the highest bid doesn't meet the reserve price.
The high bidder now gets one more chance to make an offer.
If that offer is accepted, the deal is chalked up as a winning sale, with access to BaT's verified transaction and shipping services.
When selling an item at auction, online or otherwise, the seller typically has the right to set a reserve—a minimum price the item must bring in order for the item to sell. (The exception is a no-reserve auction, in which high bidder gets the item no matter the price.)
When that reserve isn't quite met, it's a bit of a deflating moment for both the seller and the high bidder. The bidder might wonder, did they miss out on making a deal by $1000? $100? Ten bucks? Up until this point, when a car did not meet reserve on Bring a Trailer (which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos), the auction site simply put the high bidder in touch with the seller and left it to both parties to make a deal. Now the process is being tweaked a bit.
The new reserve-not-met policy kicked in starting this week, and it works as follows: If the highest bid fails to hit the reserve, that high bidder gets a 24-hour period to send the seller their best possible offer. The seller then has a further 24 hours to respond to this offer. This all takes place on Bring a Trailer's online platform, and if a deal is made, it's handled the same way as an ordinary winning bid.
"Most of the feedback seems to be, 'Why'd it take you this long?'" says Howard Swig, head of auctions for Bring a Trailer. "For the past 10 years we've been pretty heads down on building our core auction business, but given where we are now and the volume levels we're seeing, it made a lot of sense to figure out what we're doing with the reserve-not-met listings."
According to Swig, the decision as to how to address auctions that don't hit reserve was based on how Bring a Trailer generally handled things. He says that even if the high bidder didn't hit reserve, they're still considered the winner, in terms of having an opportunity to contact the seller. Now, things move in-house, with the back and forth limited to one round each between buyer and seller to keep things streamlined.
Of course, this does mean that for any successful result, Bring a Trailer gets its standard 5 percent fee, to a maximum of $7500. Further, the buyer and seller in the case of a successful negotiation like this get to use Bring a Trailer's verified transaction portal and shipping service. It's a simple change, but it allows both buyer and seller to have a little more confidence in the process rather than having to hash things out independently.
The change is still quite new, but with high-dollar machinery and huge volumes of vehicles overall coming through Bring a Trailer every day, there should be fewer cases of the one that got away. And since it's only the highest bidder who gets that one more chance, it's still a case of the best bid that takes the car home.
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