NEW YORK, NY.- LiveAuctioneers, a Manhattan-based company that provides Internet live bidding services to more than 1,800 auction houses worldwide, entered its second decade of operation in Q1 2013 with a substantial increase in both international auction-house clients and new users outside the United States. During the second quarter, the firm unveiled a stylish redesign of its website that CEO Julian R. Ellison described as “smart and modern – right in step with our technology.”
The website’s new theme is spare and generously visual, with a homepage that offers visitors the option of viewing upcoming auctions in a grid-like format with four auctions displayed per horizontal line, or in the traditional LiveAuctioneers style that features one auction with five relevant highlight images per horizontal line. According to Ellison, this is just one example of the many changes LiveAuctioneers has implemented recently in direct response to feedback received from auctioneers and bidders.
“Our website redesign continues to evolve. We want to make LiveAuctioneers not only a place where bidders can enjoy browsing online catalogs and bidding live via the Internet but also a destination for useful information presented as they prefer to view it. That’s why we’ve placed such an emphasis on listening to input from those who rely on our services – the bidders and the auction houses,” Ellison said.
All bidder activities are now aggregated on a freshly designed bidder dashboard. At that location, a logged-in LiveAuctioneers user can check their inbox, view all saved items from future sales, manage their profile and auction alerts; and monitor approvals to bid online in upcoming auctions. They can also contact an auction house to pay for a recent auction purchase and even estimate shipping costs. Another valuable dashboard tool connects to an archive of past online purchases that the user can view chronologically with a single mouse click. The auction-purchase archive provides a valuable record of when the user made each of their purchases, for how much, and from which auction house.
LiveAuctioneers’ second quarter of 2013 was a period marked by significant growth in mobile and tablet use. As compared to Q2 2012, there was a 49.89% increase in mobile visits to LiveAuctioneers.com, while visits through tablets jumped more than 64%. The average mobile visitor remained on the site 6.49% longer than in the comparable quarter of 2012.
Statistics indicated steady growth in many other key areas during Q2. Page views were up 6.98% as compared to Q2 2012, rising from 77,240,751 to 82,631,295. The number of overall visits to the site grew by 2.68% to 8,991,156; and the number of unique visitors rose 1.40% to 4,836,332. The average time spent on the site per visit increased nearly 10% over the comparable quarter of 2012.
“As these figures show, LiveAuctioneers has maintained a solid pattern of growth that has not wavered since the company was launched more than 10 years ago. We’re expecting a very busy fall and winter auction season, which should bring with it a surge of new-bidder sign-ups,” said Ellison.
