How We Built the Leading Platform for Bidding Online
By Devang Thakkar, Head of Auctions at Artsy
It’s been a while since my last post, when I outlined my transition from working on product at Microsoft to moving cross-country to join Artsy. Since joining the auctions team, we’ve been hard at work building an industry-leading auction platform, providing true value for collectors, partners, and the art market ecosystem. As such, I’m eager to share some of the thinking behind our products, our services, our tech, and how we managed to create that value for our users, partners, and the art market at large over the last two quarters.
Value for Users
For Artsy’s users, true value comes from transparency, choice, and efficiency. Our auction products are built to do just that. Here’s how:
- Transparency: Artsy is the most comprehensive resource for learning about and collecting art, and part of that resource is our artwork database. With that database, we’re able to provide a wealth of information, from a variety of sources, as a benefit to our users. From an artist’s CV, to editorial content, and auction and sale results, we’re able to provide an overview of an artist’s profile and the market. That said, we have much more work to do before we are able to provide a full picture of an artist or artwork, and we constantly struggle with the question: How much data is necessary to make reading, research, and collecting as transparent as possible?
- Choice: One of our primary goals as an auction platform is to provide our users with ease of access to the world’s best auctions. By pursuing a model that focuses on collaboration, rather than disruption, we’ve been able to strike strategic partnerships with some of the world’s top auction houses, such as Phillips and Heritage. By bringing these partners onto Artsy, our users have access to some of the very best artworks being offered at auction anywhere in the world. By partnering with a wide array of auction houses, and offering works in a wide price range (works have sold at auction on Artsy from $150 to $150,000), users have a real market to browse.
- However, we’ve had to make some choices of our own from the product side. For example, in the leadup to the launch of our live auction product in June, we debated for days about whether to incorporate a live video feed. We decided against this feature, for the moment, as we didn’t think the standard tech for live streaming provided the experience that Artsy users expect. Across the board we saw lags and choppiness in auction video feeds that did not build bidder confidence. We focused on the core functions of the product to make sure that bids are processed as seamlessly as possible, a feature that creates an environment of trust for Artsy bidders.
- Efficiency: How do people browse, bid, and shop today? It was pretty clear to us that mobile was the answer and we set out to make our mobile browsing and bidding experience world-class. For people who have not bid at live auction before (and frankly, those pro collectors who have), being able to bid from the comfort of their couch is attractive and syncs with the way many of us access content online. The moment I could open my phone in NYC and bid in a live sale happening around the world in Hong Kong, I knew we had a winning product.
Value for Our Partners
How do you run a successful auction house? A great client network, world-class specialists, and the staying power to influence the market over generations is key. Top-tier partners like Sotheby’s and Phillips have hundreds of years of expertise in the auction market, expertise that would be nearly impossible to replicate. So, what does Artsy bring to the table? World-class technology that helps our partners better connect with a savvy global audience. We provide that value a few ways; tools, data, and real results.
- Tools: As a platform for auctions, our foremost value is building the most effective tools and systems in the industry. Those tools must not only integrate seamlessly with the systems of our partners, but they must be great pieces of software on their own. We tapped into my experience of building enterprise software at Microsoft and brought some of the most intuitive functionality that users have learnt over years to our auction tools (e.g. an auction administrator using our live auction software can use the commonplace CTRL + Z function and cancel an erroneous bid just like they would erase a line in their Word document). These simple yet powerful tools have made our staff and partners more productive. For more detail about how we build these tools, with a relatively small engineering team, check out Artsy’s engineering blog here.
- Demand & Data: What good are great tools if you don’t have access to robust data to support them? By analyzing artist search data in Artsy’s comprehensive database and “dwell time” on certain artist and artwork pages, amongst other signals, we’re able to gain insight into exactly what types of auction offerings will do well on Artsy. This helps our auction partners to better curate sales to reach their clients and expand to new collectors.
- Results: Of course, having great data and best-in-class tools doesn’t mean anything if the results don’t match. To be honest, we’ve been surprised at how quickly we’ve built value for our partners and drawn new bidders to the platform [more than a 100% quarter over quarter growth in bidder registration and 300% QoQ growth in bidding on platform]. This has added tremendous value to our partners since the launch of live auction bidding. Collectors on Artsy are consistently bidding on more than 20–30% of lots in sales hosted on Artsy (and at times much more). And those bidders are being pulled from a truly global audience. To take one example, at a recent Phillips Contemporary sale, hosted in London, we saw a gentleman in Tokyo, in the very early hours of the morning, bidding live on his phone. Providing our auction house partners access to an international audience of serious bidders illustrates the value that Artsy brings to the table.
Value for the Market
What is the effect on the market if collectors can visit Artsy as a sort of “one-stop shop” for learning about and buying art? We think that transparency and ease of use are key to broadening this market, and for making existing collectors as comfortable as possible buying online. Whereas, just a few years ago, a collector may have balked at buying an artwork valued at a few thousand dollars online, we’re regularly seeing collectors dip their toe in the market above $100,000, including at auction. Here are a few other guiding points we’re thinking about for the market at large:
- Simplicity & Quality: We believe we’ve built an auction platform that is not only simple and intuitive to use, but that it is of a quality worthy to the art it represents. Of course, we have occasional bugs and glitches, but, as a tech-focused team, we’re nimble to realize those problems and provide quick fixes.
- Easy purchase? Return buyers: As I mentioned above, by building an easy-to-use interface that focuses on efficiencies for both the buyer and seller, we’ve created a forum where buyers are likely to return more than once. Especially as we offer more sales that are curated specially for the Artsy audience, such as recent sales from Rago and Doyle, we ensure that there is value for collectors coming back over and over. Also, given that there are often multiple sales happening simultaneously on Artsy, if you’re an underbidder in one auction, you can quickly discover other works just a click away. Not to mention that bidding is highly addictive!
- A more liquid market: Something else we think will increase participation in the art market: our recently-launched consignments portal. In the past, the path to market for saleable artworks was long and complicated, often taking months of back and forth between the collector and the auction house. Now, users on Artsy simply need to snap a picture of the work they’d like to sell, provide some background information on the piece, and, if it’s a quality work by an artist our partners are looking for, our team will connect the collector directly to negotiate terms. This process, rather than taking months, might now take only a few weeks.
Next steps
What’s next for online auctions? We have more than 100 auctions in the 2017 pipeline on Artsy and think that the potential growth of the marketplace only ratchets up from there. We’ll continue to add value for our partners and our users and find new ways to make all of the world’s art accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Come join us as we build the leading online arts platform.
___________________________________________________________________
Read more about Artsy engineering at Artsy’s engineering blog here.
