TMCP #571: Jono Shaw, Hemmings Gets Into The Auction Business And Makes It Easy To Get The Car You Want With Frictionless Marketplace

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This week I spoke to Jono Shaw, President of Hemmings Motor News, to find out more about the new buying service called the “Frictionless Marketplace.” For anyone who has bought a car online sight unseen it can be a little unnerving when you “win” the auction and are then left to figure out how to get the car legally, safely, and paid for without the fear of getting completely ripped off. To put it bluntly, this service is meant to put some teeth to the “wild-west” that has become common in buying a car line and put Hemmings into the mix to prevent the possibility of fraud.

Jono is third generation of a family of muscle car enthusiasts and he is working on passing it down to his kids as well. He even learned how to drive in a manual steering 1954 Chevy Bel Air. In his early years he worked for ACBJ that published numerous local business journals weekly where he learned a lot about digital products and web based offerings. He was asked to help Hemmings build up an auction platform and after he started on it he knew he had to dig in deeper as there was a lot that could be done.

Online auctions have the reputation for getting a wide audience and great visibility on your product, but what happens after the sale? It seems that once the auction is done there is still a lot of work that a brand new buyer would not know about things like vehicle inspection, title transfer, and shipping. Jono saw there were a lot of pain points to the whole process from entry to exit. everything from potential car sale price and inspection services to finance and “pay and title”.  Jono and the team at Hemmings have developed numerous products to ease those pains and take the burdens of auction purchasing away.

Hemmings can act as a dealer in the middle of the transaction and streamline many activities in the process. As a dealer they can process titles instantly and electronically after the auction is complete and payment has been made. They can also process large amounts of cash quickly with bank transfers that would be cumbersome or potentially hazardous if done by an individual. Hemmings has been able to streamline the title transfer service to be almost instantaneous and painless. Jono said since their partner KeySavvy is a licensed dealer, Hemmings is able to work with lenders that don’t normally finance private party sales.

In any online sale there is the potential for getting taken for a ride so Hemmings offers vehicle inspection services to the sellers to help ease the concern of an ad being a scam and provides an additional layer of security to ease the fears of the buyer. A new product that Hemmings will be offering soon in the Frictionless marketplace is a sale transfer service. This would allow a seller to transfer from another competing platform such as eBay to Hemmings Auctions and then allow the buyer and seller to take advantage of the streamlined services with very little effort.

Classic car sales are high and not just in the US. Many foreign markets are looking for cars from the US and Hemmings is an International platform that can help sell to a much wider market. A seller and buyer would still need to do their homework on the export compliance but the advertising would reach a global market.

You can find out more about the online auctions at Hemmings.com or you can follow Instagram.com/Hemmings, and view some videos at YouTube.com/@Hemmingsmotornews.

Thanks Jono for the insight into online auctions

-Rob Kibbe

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