Bringing Buy Now to a world of auctions

Context

Catawiki is the leading online marketplace for special objects, built on weekly auctions. Auctions are exciting, but not for everyone: many people don’t know how they work, and many bidders go home with nothing. Around 750,000 people bid and lost in a single year, according to Catawiki.

Buy Now lets sellers add a fixed price to their object, so a buyer can take it home right away while the auction keeps running. It was a big project, and one I’m really proud of.

A team of teams

This was not a one-team job. I worked with Data and Research to understand sellers, with Onboarding and Sales, and with Catawiki’s experts, the people who know how much a vintage watch or a piece of art is really worth.

A fair game for buyers and sellers

The heart of the design was transparency. Buyers needed to understand how the auction was going, what the final price could be, and when it made more sense to keep bidding or to just buy the object. And sellers needed to keep the thing that makes an auction special: people paying what they’re really willing to pay.

So we set a few rules to keep the game fair for everyone:

Rules we designed

01
Buy Now disappears on the last day.
The last day is when an auction comes alive. If Buy Now stayed, it would end the game right when bidding gets interesting.
02
Buy Now disappears when the bids get close.
Once the current bid reaches a certain percentage below the Buy Now price, the option goes away and the auction runs as usual.

This also adds a bit of strategy. When people see the bids climbing towards the Buy Now price, some decide they’d rather take the object home now, even at a higher price. We saw many of our users doing exactly that.

Helping sellers choose a fair price

How do you price something unique in an automated way? In an auction the final price can change a lot. Even for special objects, people want to pay a fair price, and price control was already a challenge at Catawiki.

We chose an open approach: sellers decide their own Buy Now price, with limits and alerts. After they add all the details of their object, machine learning looks at similar objects and how much they sold for:

If the price is a bit high, the seller sees a friendly warning that it might not sell.
If the price is clearly unrealistic, we don’t allow it.

Bidding and buying, side by side

On the object page, the purchase block had to welcome two kinds of people: the ones who love to bid and the ones who just want the object. Both options live in the same place, with the current bid first and Buy Now as a clear alternative.

Purchase block on the object page with bidding and Buy Now — Bidding and Buy Now in the same block.

Step by step

It took about a year, because we built it step by step. We started with experiments and research, and opened Buy Now only in a few categories, the ones where prices are more standard, like gold and coins. Then we added more categories and more markets. Working with so many teams and people along the way was honestly one of the best parts.

A door to Google Shopping

Something I didn’t expect: Buy Now also opened the door to Google Shopping. As an auction site, Catawiki could never appear there, because Google needs a fixed price. With Buy Now we finally had one.

We worked directly with people at Google to understand their rules and requirements for a product to show up in Google Shopping, and I designed the changes we needed to meet them. And we made it. Catawiki objects started showing up in front of a huge new audience.