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AuctionInc is all about accurate shipping calculations. We developed our products to meet our own needs, we use them ourselves, and we understand shipping from the inside out.
AuctionInc. was founded in 1997 as a person-to-person auction platform, similar to eBay. A year later AuctionInc was merged into a new corporation, Sales Online Direct (which later changed its corporate name to Paid, Inc), along with World Wide Collector’s Digest and Rotman Auction. As AuctionInc struggled to compete with Ebay, Rotman Auction was running a very successful online, phone and fax auction business. In 1999 Rotman Auction moved its operation to Ebay, to reduce overhead and increase visibility. As it continued to grow, it became more and more constrained by time-consuming order processing and customer management.
Since there was no commercial system available to handle the needs of Rotman Auction, John Martin, Chief Technology Officer, first designed and built a shipping calculator to address the delays and extra work caused by the need to determine shipping methods and cost with the customer. After that proved its worth, John decided to next work on building a brand new auction management system, with the calculator at its core. Our first version allowed for an invoicing process without any emails exchanged between the buyer and the seller. This alone saved Rotman Auction over 40,000 emails per month. The next enhancement added the ability for a customer to check out. This checkout saved almost 20 hours every week of customer data entry.
With our new automated system leading the way, Rotman Auction’s revenues from eBay sales tripled in less than 6 months. When customers began calling and asking for the Shipping Calculator for their own auction listings, Greg Rotman, CEO of Paid, Inc, decided to make the AuctionInc automated system a major focus for the entire company. He said, “We have a great product that is needed by sellers and desired by buyers. We are going to develop the best auction management system anyone has ever seen.” During the first quarter of 2002, a patent was filed for the Shipping Calculator and AuctionInc’s auction management system was launched.
Over time we have evolved our product line to include shopping carts for ecommerce sites (now our most popular product), integations into other carts such as the Mals Ecommerce Cart, and an API for direct access into our shipping engine. Our features and functionality have grown as well, so that now we support products which incorporate the most versatile and accurate shipping calculations available for determining shipping rates on the web.
Today, there are tens of thousands of customers who have use Auctioninc’s products to sell their merchandise or complete their orders. Hundreds of thousands have used AuctionInc’s shipping calculator and carts to expedite their Internet shopping experience.
Click to check out our corporate video on the origins of our product line.
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