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Recently I had various meetings with some of the biggest auction houses of US and EU and this made me realize how WebAR can help them run their business more efficiently. Immediately I think of collecting my experience and share with you in the newsletter.
Today, I'll describe how auction houses can be a great source of potential clients for your AR business and eventually you can change the landscape of how auction businesses will run in the future forever.
Quick Insight of Auction Houses and the Industry
There's no doubt that most hollywood adventure and mythical movies begin with auction house scenes. Bidding for an item often gushes the adrenaline through the bidders and collectors find it adventurous to win things via competition.
Historically, auctions have been used both to sell the assets of those looking to dispose of them, as well as to liquidate the assets of debtors. Enclosed showroom auction houses began in the 17th century. The oldest auction house is the Stockholms Auktionsverk in Stockholm, Sweden. It was founded in 1674.
In 2022, the sales value of auction market amounted to nearly 27 billion U.S. dollars, reporting a slight annual decrease – Statista
Major Challenges for Auction Houses
Although it may seem as though you just have to sit back and wait for people to bid, running an auction company is not that easy.
First off, the auction industry is extremely competitive. It seems like everyday there is a new online auction company selling similar items as you.
Secondly, it takes a lot of time to effectively operate an auction company. From marketing to accounting and the actual auction events, it can be very time consuming.
Lastly and this is the biggest challenge. People often are not sure about how the auctioned objects would look like at their home before buying and shipping them back at home. Sometimes an estimation simply does not work.
As a result, lots of expensive sold items often are returned back to auction houses. This is a great challenge across the world – both for online and in-house auction houses. Solving this challenge can bring a profitable margin to the industry.
Famous Danish auction house Lauritz got bankrupted in July 11, 2023 because they could not cope up with the market since post pandemic market is tough.
How They can Flip the Script to Become More Profitable?
In today's world, most auction houses across EU and US extend invites to the potential bidders with online catalogues of the bidding items. This brings a plateau of opportunity for the auction hosues to enrich their customers with better product infirmation.
Including Augmented Reality along with online product catalogue can solve this problem. Customers can place items via virtual try-on and see how they fit their interior with accurate dimensions. This could be furniture, paintings or any objece that could potential cause a threat of return if not bought with planning.
Christie's is a British auction house, founded in 1766. It's a world famous auction house, extended in US, EU and several places across the globe. They are using AR app for auction and eventually their business has increased over time.
For most auction houses, it could be an expensive business to update continuous product catalogues in AR apps round the year. Again convincing a customer to download or update app everytime is a another challenge.
Using WebAR in online product catalogue can eventually make their operation easy and effective for high engaging marketing. People can easily access virtual try-on from their website/webpage without downloading any apps.
High engagement, better product understanding, better conversion and lower product return – Auction Houses can place themselves in the apex of the competition.
Pitch Your Potential B2B Customers
This hundreds of years old industry is facing various challenges to survive and sustain since the pandemic. A great opportunity can help them getting back to track. You can offer them the right solution to help them flourish their business. If you have started a WebAR business, approach your nearby auction houses and pitch them the low cost, beneficial AR strategy to make a difference.
If you need help to scale your WebAR offering to auction houses, Marvin XR can help you from creating professional 3D models in bulk to build WebAR experiences in minutes. Marvin XR has partnered with some of the biggest 3D model producers to enable low cost, high quality 3D models to be hosted for the AR campaigns along with one-click online integrations.