Introduction to Online Sales

What A Wild Ride!

It was August when I saw the notification - Cascade Boer Goat Association is taking entries for their Fall Boer-Nanza Sale. There has only been one other sale that I have entered goats into. That was 7 years ago and required me to drive for 8 hours to get there. It wasn't a terrible experience, but... when tallying up the costs it became apparent that it really hadn't been worth it.

How the world has changed since then! Remember Covid-19 and lock downs? Yep, there are still some sales where people come together and do them live, but there's also a lot of online sales now. In a way it seems like a more efficient, cost effective way to sell goats, but what does it take for someone to be convinced they want to buy your goat when they can't look you in the eye and put their hand on the goat's loin?

In December 2020 we had picked up and moved across the country and left all our connections on the other side of the country. Since then we've only gotten out to a few shows and only made a few new connections here. I knew there was an enormous amount of work to be done to be successful in an online show.

Before I knew it the deadline to enter goats into the show was upon me and Rob and I decided to go for it. Enter a goat? No, we entered 10! Ten goats to wash and clip and take pictures of and make videos for. Ten goats that needed to learn to walk on a lead and place their feet and hold still. We were depending on our goats being smart, kind and cooperative!

As we scrambled to have our goats look the part online we also scrambled to get the information about each of them listed online. Now, everyone has their own style of talking about goat's strengths and selling points. To be honest, I've always thought that we each have our own preferences and know what we like when we see it. In other words, I have a lot of learning to do! The day of the sale came and I knew that there was so much more that I could have done to promote our goats - I didn't even have our website up yet.

I was riddled with anxiety. I believe in the animals we breed. I believe that we are breeding animals who can stay healthy and be fertile and maternal and productive. I also know that we don't push our animals to grow and be fat. We don't have a show string that gets special feed and treatment. Every morning the barn doors are opened and all of our animals go out on the mountainside to browse. But I haven't been promoting our program and no one knows who we are.

The night before the sale Rob and I sat down to talk about what each goat was worth to us and at what price we would part with each of them. We agreed that getting our goats out to people in the area would be a great form of advertisement, and advertising comes at a cost. We would keep our reserves, and hopes, low.

The night before the sale I checked the goats over and one of our does had a small wound that hadn't fully healed, so we pulled her out of the sale the night before it opened, and so the roller coaster began.

At the close of the sale there were 7 does and our senior buck who all had new owners. The response to Love Machine had been incredible and as the dust settled he was going home to the farm that had bred him, loving raised him and sold him to us 2 years ago. The nerves, adrenaline and anticipation were being met with a feeling of being deeply satisfied we had accomplished our first online sale. Now all that was left was to communicate with each of the new owners to coordinate pick up of their goats.

As transportation for 4 of the does was set in my calendar it was becoming apparent that there was a problem. One man had the winning bid on 4 of our does, but now he wasn't responding to my text messages. It wasn't long before I learned that he had the winning bids on over 20 goats, and he was ghosting all of us, and the auction company too.

The roller coaster ride was on the way back down. It felt like whiplash. The normal remedies that the auction house use weren't going to work. It was all too much, too many.

The decision was made to have a new sale. It was all unprecedented, unknown territory. But I also now had more time. A do-over. It was time to buckle down, take better pictures, better videos on some of them. Time to get the website up and running! Time to connect and build relationships.