Bippy launch Tophatter, live auctions More fun

After directing blippy to E-commerce projects, the original Bilppy team that developed the "Share shopping information" has tried a new direction: to build a real-time auction site Tophatter and to launch today's iOS version of the live auction.

Like Blippy, Tophatter also serves social shopping. CEO Ashivin Kumar and chief Operating Officer (COO) Andrew Blachman said Tophatter would bring a fun personalized online auction experience for users. The closest existing service, says Kumar, should be a television sales network such as home Shopping receptacle and QVC, rather than an online shopping network such as ebay.

"We'll start with fun and entertainment rather than the auction itself," says Kumar. Think of real-life scenarios-how do you get the feeling of having fun? We decided to simulate the situation by concentrating all the participants into a ' house '. ”

Tophatter is designed to recreate an immersive auction experience--you can choose a variety of venues, participants have a specific image, can talk to each other, as in real-world auctions. Even the gavel to announce the deal.

To be honest, when I first heard such a description, I thought only of some of the mundane virtual boardroom I had seen before, but it turns out that Kumar and Blachman think more than that. Tophatter's design is flexible and full of cartoons, and the details are unambiguous--for example, you can look at the panorama of the auction by rotating the screen edge.

The app is an extension of the auction's real-life experience on the phone. After all, in order to bid for an item, first you have to appear in the room where the auction is held, real time interaction is an important element of this experience. This app allows you to keep up with the auction situation even if you leave the computer. You can even browse for items to be auctioned in advance, set reminders, and you will receive a push reminder at the beginning of the sale of the item.

For this auction site, Tophatter has been quietly prepared for a year, and even built a highly active virtual community. When the team introduced me to the site last week, there were several auctions going on at the same time, each with a very high seating rate. In the afternoon I downloaded the corresponding Apple control and found it was equally lively. Of course, as Kumar and Blachman say, control of supply and demand may also be one of the reasons why there is no room for vacancies.

Kumar said it had achieved more than 500,000 auctions in March, with a sales rate of 80% per cent. In other words, the sale of the goods to be auctioned is actually quite impressive (ebay has the same statistic of 40%).