AuctionsPlus, Australia's dominant online livestock marketing platform, will charge stock agents an annual subscription to list cattle or sheep from 2027, Beef Central reported. Beef Central likened the model to warehouse retailer Costco, which charges members a yearly fee for the right to shop.
At the top level, the fee for accredited assessors will be between $1,668 and $2,388 a year, depending on payment terms. Newly accredited assessors get two years free, and occasional users get their first three listings each year free before the subscription applies, which is understood to cover about 30 per cent of assessors. The platform lists 1,328 livestock assessors, 1,046 for cattle and 864 for sheep, some doing both.
The charge applies to every agent assessor, including those at Elders and Nutrien, the two national agencies that own AuctionsPlus. The company began telling its core agency stakeholders on Monday, and agents Beef Central spoke to were uniformly negative. One said agents would simply pass the cost on to their livestock clients; another suggested larger agencies might buy one subscription and route all their listings through it.
AuctionsPlus blamed the rising cost of software development and security as it "delivers and scales a market-leading trading platform", and said the subscription would keep it "sustainably resourced now and into the future". A spokesman said its 'Bloodline Verified' feature, which checks that a vendor's claim of a particular stud's genetics in a line of cattle is true, cost $500,000 to develop. The company employs 13 in-house web developers and cites sharp rises in web hosting fees.
"What we are trying to do is build more and more tools that make the agent's life easier and/or faster," the spokesman said, adding that a side-by-side test of one listing tool had saved an agent 43 per cent of listing time. Only studs that sell through AuctionsPlus can be referenced in Bloodline Verified; studs using a rival platform such as Stocklive are not eligible unless they pay a fee.
For producers who sell through the platform, the question is whether agents absorb the subscription or add it to selling costs, which several agents expect they will.
Photo: State Library of Queensland / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Source: Beef Central (reported by Jon Condon)
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