A New Cloud-Based Exchange for Thoroughbred Consignors and Bloodstock Agents

Lexington, KY, May 17, 2016 (Newswire.com) - A new web-based tool is available for commercial Thoroughbred sales consignors for promoting their stock, leveraging the latest in cloud services. ThoroughbredCatalog.com (https://www.ThoroughbredCatalog.com) provides a single, unified platform for consignors of any size and budget to post horses and their associated information in one place, with unlimited image and video uploads for each horse.

This platform brings many advantages to the table. ThoroughbredCatalog.com enables consignors, with or without their own websites, to post up-to-date information about their horses, all from a single, easy-to-use portal, using their desktop computer or mobile device. In addition to the photo and video uploads, the consignor portal also provides HTML code to the consignors to embed a view of their consignments on their own websites, much like YouTube and Vimeo provide code for embedding videos on external websites. If any of the embedded views are placed on the consignor's existing website (or even a blog page), this information will be updated on their website as the consignor updates the information on each horse. Information that can be placed in the site include the basic information about the horse (sire, dam, dam sire, year of birth, color, sex, "offered as" information, etc.) but also includes the catalogue pedigree from the sale company, once the sale company makes their online catalogue publicly available for each sale. The pedigree PDF link is obtained automatically for the consignor from the sale company, provided the consignor has placed a valid hip number in the consignor portal for the horse being offered.

The website provides a simple, affordable means for consignors to upload unlimited photos and videos for each hip being offered, all for just $10 per horse (per sale). ThoroughbredCatalog.com's developer and owner, Jared Gollnitz, has noted that the breeze videos provided by the sale companies for horses that go through two-year-olds-in-training sales are helpful but do not show everything there is to know about the horse. In most cases, sale companies do not provide walking videos or slow gallop work videos for two year-olds, or any other age of horse for that matter. Currently, a consignor must leverage their existing website and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Vimeo to post individual photos and videos of their horses that are not able to be cohesively grouped with the catalogue page and different multimedia types, if they're not using their own website. If the consignor is using their own website, they still have to pay for hosting of those files. Depending on which hosting service and file storage option the consignor's web developer uses, hosting image and video files can be expensive and time-consuming to upload and organize. ThoroughbredCatalog.com handles the storage and organization of these files for the consignor, while still enabling the consignor to embed the dynamic listings on his/her own website.

"ThoroughbredCatalog.com provides for a real, widespread need in the commercial Thoroughbred industry by enabling consignors to bring together all multimedia artifacts, such as photo and video, associated with horses in a particular sale, using a fast, easy-to-use tool" Gollnitz says. "Some of the more prominent consignors have taken it upon themselves to hire a professional web developer, and understandably so, to meet this need. However, the time and effort needed to do project planning, site design, and put out bids for and hire a web developer is not always a realistic proposition for new or small-scale consignors who may be under manpower or financial constraints. The technology available for web development, hosting, database management, file storage, and Identity and Access Management on Microsoft Azure has made creating this offering much easier and affordable than in years past. It seemed like the right time to create this offering as advancements in technology have caught up to the demand for a service such as this. The pricing models of current cloud offerings make it feasible to offer such capabilities to any consignor at a reasonable price point."

"A good number of consignors bring their entire staff with them to the sales, requiring many consignors to go through a middle-man web developer to make minor content updates to their websites. With the new consignor portal, the consignors can easily take and post pictures and videos and make any necessary changes to the hip profile straight from their smart phones or tablets, right at the sale barn, without having to e-mail these items to another person to add to their website."  Bloodstock agent Kyle Kaenel of TKO Bloodstock noted the videos of the consignments posted on the website. "I like the slow gallop videos taken and posted with the iPhones. Videos like these allow me to see what kind of movers the horses are in their normal training routine."

Photographers can also be assigned accounts for the consignor portal and can be granted the ability to upload photos on behalf of one or more subscribing consignors with a single account.  When describing her experience of uploading photos and videos to the catalog, Ocala, FL Thoroughbred photographer Sandra Madison said "It was super-easy... I've had to upload to farm websites before, [and] this was the easiest..."

The consignor portal also provides a hit count for each horse in their consignment. In addition to embeddable views, consignors also receive a profile where only their consignments are displayed and they can post their contact information, website, and social media information, and includes an optional Twitter feed.

Another major problem that is solved by ThoroughbredCatalog.com is that buyers currently have to go to each individual consignor’s website, if they have one, to see the available multimedia galleries for each consignment. Laurie Ross of Iron Maidens Thoroughbreds in Florida said ThoroughbredCatalog.com "fills a much-needed segment for sellers and buyers. It will certainly be helpful to see all of the offerings, especially photos and videos, in one place, without having to hunt from site to site.”

Prospective buyers can also save favorites, create e-mail alerts, and make their own personal notes on each horse, provided they are registered (for free) and signed in to the website. Anonymous users can still browse horses. The site also allows easy sharing on Facebook and Twitter. The site also features a basic search capability plus image and video galleries of upcoming sales.

Another feature of ThoroughbredCatalog.com is the quality control placed on the people who post horses. The consignors that post horses to the site must have accounts manually created and provided to them by the site owner. Consignors must be known, established consignors with a verifiable history of consigning horses at major public sales, or, if the consignor is starting a new business, they must be able to provide a reference in the form of a known consignor who has previously employed the person, or one who is training alongside the new consignor and can vouch for the new consignor's involvement in the business. This separates ThoroughbredCatalog.com from other websites for selling horses, such as EquineGateway.com and ThoroughbredShowcase.com, both of which allow literally anyone to sign up and start posting horses. The controls in place on ThoroughbredCatalog.com provide an extra layer of security to both the buyers and sellers and provide integrity to the content on the website.

ThoroughbredCatalog.com also features an OData (Open Data Protocol) feed available for consuming site data in external applications (like Microsoft Excel) or third-party web sites. The OData feed is helpful if a consignor wants to customize the formatting of the data from ThoroughbredCatalog.com on their own website, or if the consignor wants to use the data from the site for another purpose, such as creating a custom application to manage their accounting of sale horses, for example.

Please visit https://www.ThoroughbredCatalog.com for more information and news.

Source: ThoroughbredCatalog.com