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Jim and Crystal Wells-Miller founded OTWA in 1999. Their vision was to create a place online where people could meet and visit with other online sellers and share their workday. In Adam Cohen's book, "The Perfect Store," Cohen says eBay viewed OTWA as a barometer of community sentiment, and the opinions expressed on the OTWA and AuctionWatch boards "could literally change eBay policy." OTWA is the oldest, largest non-affiliated OAI message forum on the Internet, and many auction users go to OTWA to get their "fix" of business networking and socializing.
AuctionBytes: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What did you do before you became involved in the online auction industry?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: When Crystal and I met, we both worked regular jobs in very different industries. Soon after we met, we both left our jobs to start our own business in the antiques and collectibles field. Within a short time, we opened an antiques mall with about 60 dealers.
AuctionBytes: When did you discover online auctions and how did you become involved in them?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: During the spring of 1997, we kept hearing about this great website from all our customers and dealers in the antiques mall. They told us stories of selling online, stories of turning merchandise in days rather then weeks or months, we could see their excitement, and we wanted to check out the website, but we where just too busy with the management of the mall to really take the time.
Jump forward 6 months. It was now the fall of 1997, a crowd gathered at the front door of the mall, it was about a dozen of our dealers hanging out and talking. The excitement in the air was too much to resist, we had to find out what was going on. They were all talking about how great selling online was. It was time for us to check it out personally. We listed our first item on eBay in October of 1997. With no clue, and no photos, we listed a bunch of older hallmark ornaments that had not sold the previous holiday season at the mall. They all sold, and for much more then we originally had them priced. This was just the beginning.
We ran out, purchased a digital camera, and started to list as much as we could as fast as we could, we were excited about the possibilities. Three months later, we sold the antiques mall and became full time eBay sellers.
AuctionBytes: How do you work together as a husband-and-wife team, what are the challenges?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: It's great. We've been together for 18 years, and we've worked together for the past 15 years. We have no problem working together. You know what each other is good at, and that's how you divide the tasks - you don't let egos get in the way.
Here's how it works: you keep your work separate from your house. We never talk business when we're sitting in the living room, you never mix the location. We have a breezeway attached to a huge office. If we're watching TV and think of something business-related during a commercial, you just can't start talking business, you have to take a note and talk about it later.
AuctionBytes: How do you manage it, I would think it's so tempting to talk about business when you're together.
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: It takes practice. When one starts talking about business, the other person just has to put their foot down.
AuctionBytes: How has the online-auction industry changed since you first became involved?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: The most noticeable change is in the excitement level. It is just not there anymore. It has gone from the "party of the century" to "just business." It is no longer about the person, the individual; it is about the statistics, the numbers, and the bottom line.
AuctionBytes: What inspired you to start OTWA?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: It was an inevitable progression really.
Crystal would post to the eBay Q&A chat board between listing auctions, answering bidder emails, etc.; it was the work break throughout the day. As it turned from a user-to-user help/water-cooler environment to people complaining about how eBay was changing, how eBay was doing this wrong or that wrong, it became less and less of a break from the work. She asked me to put up a chat board where people could hang out taking their breaks; we called it "crystal's no complaints board" - there was no registration, no usernames, no passwords, it was just a place to hang out.
Soon after this, we started Club99, the first online sellers group, with this; we found we needed another chat board that would support usernames. The workload involved in these chat boards was taking just too much time from our selling and we needed something more streamlined. I started to look around for some better software that would take less maintenance time.
Once I found the right software, I needed a domain name to make it easier for people to get to the site. I had an old domain name that we did not use, it was OTWA.COM (originally, this was an acronym for "On The Web Antiques", and was going to be used to compliment our eBay selling). We needed to find another name for the acronym that would fit. It had to make sense with what we were doing. This is how we came up with the "Online Traders Web Alliance" name. It fit what we wanted to do, which was create a place where people could meet and visit with other online sellers and share their workday. OTWA has grown into the largest non-affiliated OAI message forum on the Internet.
AuctionBytes: Tell us a bit about how OTWA became part of Honesty/Andale.
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: OTWA was opened on June 1, 1999; a few months later, it was getting so busy we had to start thinking about upgrading/adding servers in order to handle the amount of traffic the site was getting. It was a hard time for Crystal and me; our only income was from selling online and we really did not think of OTWA as a business, it was just something we were doing for the community. Now, it was starting to take control of our time, and was starting to cost us much more then we cared to spend. We had to make a hard decision. Either turn OTWA into a business, or sell it to Honesty.com for the good of the community. We chose to sell it. We did not want to make it a business; it was for the community, not for a profit.
I do not feel at liberty to discuss the details of Andale's purchase of Honesty other then to say that it included OTWA as part of the purchase. Simply put, Honesty purchased OTWA, and then sold both Honesty and OTWA to Andale. Crystal and I continued to manage the OTWA site under Andale.
I would not be complete in my answer to this question without including what happened next...
On January 26, 2004, we acquired OTWA back from Andale. OTWA is once again independent and non-affiliated. In support of this, the CEO of Andale made the following announcement to the OTWA community:
"In 2000, I made the decision to make OTWA a corporate community site under Andale. It is time to change directions. Community is not about corporation, it is about people. I have always felt that for a community to function it needed to be a place where people would express their ideas with little or no censorship. Over the last few years, I hope you feel that OTWA has been more open than many other auction boards (some of whom are no longer with us). However, it cannot truly be an open board until it is un-affiliated."
AuctionBytes: What are some of your most memorable experiences in this industry?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: There are so many, I could not begin to put my finger a specific few.
AuctionBytes: The people who make up the OAI are not shy about expressing their opinions. Does that make running a discussion forum challenging? What are some of the other challenges?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: This is actually a double-edged sword and can definitely make things quite challenging at times. Once one understands the dynamics of the makeup of the community things start to get easier though. If you were to step back and look at the individuals that make up OAI rather then looking at it as a whole you start to understand.
These people are not shy about expressing their opinions because they are a group if independent, self motivated people that have the drive and desire to be self-employed (even if only part time) - they are not a group of "workers." Good business people rarely make good employees, and good employees rarely make good business people.
Maintaining a good balance of positive and negative opinion probably makes up the most interesting challenge of all.
Running a discussion forum presents itself with a new and different challenge almost every day. I would say the two most consistent and long lasting challenges is knowing who you are really talking to behind the username, and maintaining an elevated level of respect, and courtesy within the community forums that we all commonly have toward other people when in person.
AuctionBytes: Do you feel that online merchants are in a better position now than 4 or 5 years ago? Why or why not?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: In some ways yes, in most ways no.
We are in a better position when it comes to mainstream acceptance of the industry as a whole. We have services, tools, programs, and tons of information that can help, a lot of this did not exist 5 years ago, but that is where things take a turn for the no side...
There is so much going on at any given time that we often fall victim to information overload. Competition is much fiercer; it is much more difficult to sell now than in the past. Selling online has become so complicated that it is no longer easy to do. At one time, the listing form on eBay was one page, and the selling rules were minimal. Auction management applications and tools are no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
Five years ago, you could start to sell online in a matter of minutes, now the learning curve is so high it takes a major commitment of time just to get started. Let me elaborate.
eBay's user agreement is about 4,500 words long (7 pages), add another 1,500 words for the fees and credits policy (7 pages), add another 70-100 pages for the "prohibited and restricted items" policies, another 70-100 pages for their listing policies, another 5 pages for their outage policy, another 3 for their board policies, another 40-50 pages for their investigations policies,.. Well, you get the idea, 200-300 pages of not just reading, but policies that you have to adhere to if you want to sell online. Then, just about the time you get it mastered, something major changes and you have this huge adjustment to the way you have to do things.
So no, I do not feel that overall the online merchant is in a better position now than 4-5 years ago.
AuctionBytes: OTWA is a real "community" of users. Do you feel that online auction users, as a community, have the same voice that they had in the past?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: Not even close, at one time even the individual voice could be heard. However, with so many voices coming at the decision-makers, it becomes too difficult for any one seller to affect change. Even as a "community of users" the voice often becomes diluted to the point of ineffectiveness. I believe this can change though, the key to solving this problem within the industry is focus.
Rather than a muddle of voices all weighing in on different issues. I believe that any group can affect change, but only by focusing on a single issue, and seeing it though to its final resolution.
AuctionBytes: What are some of the most memorable topics that have been posted on OTWA?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: I would have to say that the most memorable topics did not involve selling or buying, but real peoples' lives.
I and many others learned of the terrorist attack of 9/11 on OTWA, we anxiously awaited the next post with news of what was happening, news was reported on OTWA before it hit CNN. People we knew were there. It was a day that no one seemed to be able to leave and the community provided the ability to connect with and touch others. Other threads full of knowledge, information, caring and support just did not compare to the threads of that day.
AuctionBytes: What are the challenges users are facing?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: Aside from the obvious challenges of supply and demand, customer acquisition, market saturation, and competition, today's users are facing a much larger problem, the attitude of the OAI as a whole toward their individual businesses.
Just like any other business, many users rely on their business income to survive. However, unlike traditional brick and mortar businesses, this business income can be reduced to near zero with a few clicks on the keyboard by the site where they sell their goods. Inadvertently violate a single section of a user agreement (200-300 pages of rules in the case of eBay) and you may find that 4,000 of your auctions have been not only canceled, but also deleted from the auction site; costing you perhaps days of listing prep time.
Add to this the lack of efficient customer support and you may find that you are totally out-of-business for days or even 1-2 weeks at a time while you try to find out why it happened to begin with.
Other major challenges include the deluge of spam, email spoofs, viruses, worms, and other security threats that we all receive on a daily basis. Keeping ourselves up-to-date with the latest security patches and threats can really consume a lot of time that could otherwise be used more productively.
Finally, the inability to actually plan the future of our online businesses when these businesses rely on third party Web sites such as eBay. This is probably the most crucial challenge as it involves future growth and longevity.
AuctionBytes: Where do you see the industry headed?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: That is such a broad topic, there are so many ways to answer it. I could go on for pages and pages.. I will try to sum it up with this.
I see less sellers using the auction format and dedicating more time to developing and marketing their own online storefronts or malls. I see new sellers stepping in to try to fill the void only to find the same problems the previous sellers had. I see the cycle repeating itself over and over again.
I see the industry becoming more and more streamlined for the seller and for the buyer. This will also bring with it other problems such as totally self-contained auction sites. (All related services provided by the auction site, no outside payment services, no 3rd party listing tools, no access to outside services from within the site at all.)
I see the industries that have been lagging behind starting to step in and help the industry evolve toward new and better solutions for the both the seller and the buyer.
AuctionBytes: What are some of the biggest challenges facing online-auction sellers in the next 5 years?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: Quite frankly, I see most of the same challenges of today, perhaps just more magnified.
AuctionBytes: Are you working on any projects for the future?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: Yes, just one project. Preparing OTWA to evolve into a true Online Traders Web Alliance.
AuctionBytes: Where do you see OTWA in 5 years?
Jim & Crystal Wells-Miller: I see OTWA remaining independent and being 100% member supported and driven. While we are member-driven now, we intend to target our focus on the needs of our members.
There is currently a sellers group on OTWA called Club99 that organizes sales and special events on various auction sites; Club99 exemplifies a grass roots group effort. These independent sellers are the epitome of where OTWA can assist members in a larger scale effort. Supporting independent groups like this is something we feel strongly about.
Crystal and I recently sat down for three days with notebooks outlining all the things that we wanted to achieve with OTWA. While it is not quite a 5-year plan, our first task of moving to a new platform is finally complete with a final release of our new home page coming sometime next week. Our new platform allows us to create some user-focused programs, such as our 300-second club, in which we award members with OTWA points for fun or business tasks that take around 5 minutes to complete and provide helpful tips and encouragement to other users.
A haunting issue that we want to address is seller advocacy on some level. There are issues in this industry that are solvable but lack process. This area is a recurring theme in our goals, and may be our ultimate challenge. This is just the beginning.
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