Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Shawn Milne from Janney Montgomery Scott. Shawn, you may proceed.
Shawn Milne – Janney Montgomery Scott
Hi, good afternoon. It’s Shawn Milne from Janney Montgomery. A couple questions, and thanks for taking my questions and I apologize in advance for the background noise. But, Bill, good solid commercial growth this quarter. Can you talk about the linearity in the quarter? Did you see better growth in March? It sounded like it was and our data would suggest that it did. And in terms of the pipeline of new partners, when can we start to see that come on to the platform and potentially accelerate growth. And then, Jim, if you could address the margin potential in terms of increased operating efficiencies in your commercial business, what kind of magnitude are we potentially looking at here? Thank you very much.
Bill Angrick
Sure, I’ll take the first part of the question. With regard to the commercial business, we’ve seen consecutive months really dating back to November of improving auction volume, buyer participation, recovery rates, and therefore, GMV. Now it is true March is a seasonally longer month than others, yet the recurring ramp that we are seeing across the buyer and the seller side is very encouraging for commercial. As we noted one quarter ago, we have invested in expanding the size of our business development team. We brought two new Directors on in early March. So we expect to get traction in some of the prospects in that pipeline during the second half of the year; by the way of example, we are looking at expanding into new product verticals such as personal care and accessories, non-perishable food, appliances, certain branded apparel items, a variety of gaming systems and consoles. So there is a wide range of Fortune 500 retail and manufacturing prospects in that frontal, and I do believe we are going to see the benefit of that. I think I would add that one other reasons we’ve had such a focus on operational productivity and efficiency is we want to create the capacity given what we observed in our business development pipeline. When you look at the inventory turnover numbers, I’ve been around a lot of traditional distribution businesses, to improve as rapidly as we’ve improved in the span of three months in terms of throughput and velocity is a real testament to the team, but also I think our acknowledgement that we have some big [ph] opportunities on the business development side and need to have that capacity. So we are well positioned to execute during the last half of the year. And that’s part of the margin story that you saw in the March quarter. And I think that will continue.
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