When we ran simulcast auctions, with people bidding in the room and online, I heard the same suspicion time and again. The people in the room thought the internet had an advantage, and the people online thought the floor did.
I think putting those two methods of bidding into the same auction can create distrust. Each group competes against people whose way of participating differs from its own. That gives bidders another reason to question whether everyone has the same opportunity to compete.
The online bidder could see the current bid and the next asking bid. In some auctions, they could also hear and see the auctioneer and watch video of the floor. Yet I still heard concerns about whether the floor had an advantage. People standing in the room expressed the opposite concern. Some bidders told me they wouldn’t bid with us again.
Those complaints stayed with me when I looked at our Net Promoter Score, or NPS, history. NPS measures customers’ willingness to recommend us. Our last simulcast auction was in February 2020. After that, we went entirely online. Our earlier GatherUp analysis showed quarterly NPS averaging roughly 41 in 2018 and 2019, compared with roughly 51 from our last simulcast through the end of the analysis period.
That difference gave me a reason to take the suspicion seriously. The complaints suggested that competing through two different methods could undermine trust. The higher NPS in the online era was consistent with the possibility that using one method improved the bidder experience.
It wasn’t an immediate improvement after the switch. Scores were low before our last simulcast sale and stayed low through the first online months. COVID, auction mix, changes in how the auctions ran, and who answered the survey could also explain the later difference. Some people who preferred bidding in person may also have stopped participating. NPS doesn’t tell me whether distrust caused it. I see the scores and the complaints as a reason to investigate the connection, not as proof that leaving simulcast produced a ten-point gain.
What interests me is the possibility that the format itself creates a recurring question about the other side’s advantage. An auctioneer might handle bids fairly and still struggle to resolve that suspicion. And if the process did give one side a worse opportunity, explaining it more clearly wouldn’t fix it.
Offering both methods gives people more ways to participate. I think we also need to ask whether bringing those methods together makes people less confident in the auction. Adding access and earning trust aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Our experience makes me suspect that using one method removed a source of distrust. That doesn’t establish that online is better than live; whether live-only would have produced a similar result remains an open question. But it changes how I think about offering both. I would want to weigh the additional participation against the possibility that the two methods, competing in the same sale, leave bidders less willing to recommend us.