Putting the auction at the center of the retail trade-in process — sounds odd, right? 

Not to Selectbidder, a Web platform and smartphone app that aims to utilize the auction’s traditional role of dealer network and bring it to the front end of the retail process to help get the dominos dropping a bit faster.

Based out of the Canadian city of Moncton, New Brunswick, Selectbidder has recently taken its first official strides into the United States market by signing its first U.S. wholesale partner, Space Coast Auto Auction, over 1,800 miles away in Melbourne, Fla. 

It’s only fitting that that relationship was also auction-facilitated — in this case, at last month's National Auto Auction Association Convention in Orlando, Fla.

So how does it work? To put it simply, Selectbidder takes an auction’s already established network of dealers and connects those with recent or pending trade-ins to interested buyers. 

With the primary objectives of speed and transparency at the forefront, the aim is to spread the auction’s role from the middle of the process to the very beginning, making it clear to everyone involved in the process what a fair trade-in price will be and minimize the discrepancy that can sometimes result between the trade-in price and the at-auction price. 

According to Sean Liptay, Selectbidder’s chief executive officer, it took a bit of experimenting to decide to make the auction the center of the environment.

“The trials and tribulations of trying to start a tech company,” Liptay said in a conversation with Auto Remarketing at the convention. “It took us to this point to find out the right product and market, and it turns out it’s having the auction at the center of the ecosystem.”

The company reached that point after three years of building its dealer-to-dealer platform.

After growing up in the wholesale business and serving as the second-generation owner of The Great Northern Auction (TGNA), the largest public auto auction in Eastern Canada, it makes sense that Liptay would understand the role auctions have always played as the “original dealer network.” 

Kevin Berry, Selectbidder’s chief operating officer, says that Liptay saw the future of brick-and-mortar auctions in peril. After TGNA launched its pilot with three dealers in April and put the program into full deployment in May, the company said that Selectbidder has helped the auction gain more customers and more touch points, and has increased traffic through its lanes.

“And as we started doing that, started experimenting with dealers, we realized that the auction actually provided a lot of the value-added services to it,” Berry said. “And we started talking to dealers, too, who had tried other dealer-to-dealer platforms, and we realized that that was a key component missing and that the auction is the local market maker.

“They provide that trusted mediator to be able to facilitate a lot of these transactions. From the pickup, to the detailing, to the title services. The financing for the buying dealers. Arbitration. The list goes on. So we did a pivot and said, ‘you know, we’re going to do a dealer-to-dealer platform for the auction,’ really realizing that the auction is the original dealer network.”

Logan Keirstead, serving as both a business development representative for TGNA and a marketing and sales rep for Selectbidder, says that the latter system not only helps speed up the process — which can take as little as 20 minutes (and sometimes less) to start receiving offers — but can also take the dealership away from being the “bad guy” during a trade-in.

“We understand that the trade-in process is painful for most people … It needs to be a quick turnaround, because the consumers really want a price as quickly as possible. So we tried to make it instant.”

She later added: “The used-car manager is no longer the bad guy. He can turn and say, ‘These are the real offers coming from the auction where it’s going to go. This is what I can offer you for your trade-in.’” 

Berry distilled the difference between how most dealers approach trade-ins and how they work with the Selectbidder system, pointing out how it can help make customers feel more at ease with the offer they receive.

“Right now a dealer will look it up in a book or online and say, ‘Black Book or Blue Book or whatever says it’s worth this much.’ My grandmother doesn’t know what that means,” Berry said. “Or they can say, ‘I called four wholesalers, and this is the best number I got.’ That customer doesn’t know whether or not to believe them. 

“But with this, it’s a real system; you can show it and say, ‘here’s five offers from five real dealers.’ And it shows the condition reports, too, showing, ‘here’s the reasons why you might not be getting as much as that car you saw on Autotrader. You know, your check engine light’s on, you need new tires, you’ve got a cracked windshield.’ It takes them right through that.” 

Liptay says the company has aspirations to take the system across the entire continent.

“The beauty of the product is that it can be up and running within a week in any location in North America, based around surrounding independent auctions,” Liptay said. “So it doesn’t matter if it’s the local auction in Florida versus the local auction in Louisiana, they can be up and running because they already have the relationship network built.”

Editor Joe Overby contributed to this story.