Familiarize yourself with settings that impact your auction.
After you create your new auction, you will need to choose the auction settings. These settings are critical in defining your auction and most of them cannot be changed once the auction is live, so be sure to double-check everything before clicking "Submit" to launch your auction to add listings.
General Settings
Auction Name:
Choose a clear and descriptive name for your auction that highlights its key features, such as the type of items, lot sizes, or target audience. You can edit the Auction Name after the auction is live.
Bidding Type:
This is one of the most important settings for your auction. There are currently two options, and this setting cannot be changed once the auction is live.
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Open Bidding: This is the standard auction format where all bids and prices are visible to customers. It is best suited for individual items or when you have many listings in your auction that you want to move quickly. However, if an item receives only a few bids, it may not sell at your target price.
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Blind Bidding: In this format, bids and prices are hidden from buyers, allowing them to offer any amount for your listings. This option works well when selling individual pallets with large quantities of items or when you want to gauge offers from customers. While you have more freedom to choose the final price, you may receive fewer bids overall.
Auction Goes Live At:
Your auction can be launched manually after listing your items or automatically by setting an "Auction Goes Live At" date. If you choose the automatic option, specify a date and time for the auction to launch on its own. Be sure all details are finalized before the set date and time to avoid the need to cancel and recreate your auction.
First Listing Closes At:
This is the start of the auction’s closing process (i.e. the end date / time). Our auctions feature staggered closings, where items close sequentially, with a 20-second interval between each closing. However, this timing may vary if a bidding war occurs, as our platform includes a popcorn bidding feature, where an item’s closing time is extended slightly when bids are placed near the scheduled closing time.
Conditions Scale:
This feature is how your listings are graded; select a template, or create your own for a unique way to customize your selling experience. Custom condition scales can be tailored to the types of products you’re listing, enabling flexibility and precision in describing item conditions for your auctions.
Creating a custom conditions scale is simple. The example below demonstrates how to create a conditions scale for Cell Phones and Tablets. You can easily add or remove scales, as well as assign titles and provide descriptions for each.
Note: When bulk uploading items using a CSV file, you can use the condition names you’ve created in the Listing Conditions column to define each item’s condition. Buyers will see the condition displayed on the listing cards and the listing page in the buyer portal.
Enable Offer Less feature:
The Enable Offer Less feature allows buyers to place an offer below the starting bid if no bids have been placed yet. This can be particularly useful when selling pallets of items, as it enables you to gauge buyer interest and receive offers. From your "Auction Details" page, you can manually decide whether to accept an offer while your auction is live—there’s no need to wait until the auction ends to take action.
Show Number of Bids:
Use the toggle switch to enable the Show Number of Bids feature, which will display “<5 offers/bids” until the total bids exceeds 5.
Seller's Fee:
Traditionally known as a Buyer’s Premium, the Seller’s Fee is an additional charge buyers pay on top of their order total and is your revenue to keep. This fee is applied at checkout, and you can set the percentage of the order value you want the fee to be if you choose to add one.
You can view all the fees available on our platform by visiting the Fees Page.
Registration & Privacy
These settings are critical for determining the publicity of your auctions and whether anyone can register. They cannot be changed after your auction is created.
Auction Privacy:
There are two options to control the visibility of your auction on our platform:
Public auction: visible to all buyers on the platform. Your listings will appear in the general listings view alongside other auctions. Participation in these auctions depends on your registration approval settings. Public auctions are ideal for moving merchandise quickly and generating more bids by exposing your items to the largest possible audience.
- Private Auction: hidden from the platform and can only be accessed via a private link or by pre-approved buyers. Common use cases for private auctions include:
- Restricting access to a specific list of buyers.
- Using the auction as an incentive to grow your subscriber base or mailing list.
- Rewarding buyers for meeting specific conditions, such as frequent participation in your auctions.
- Limiting sales to buyers with specific certificates or qualifications.
Note: You can share a link to your private auction but still set registration approvals to “request access,” allowing you to control who can participate.
Auto Approve Buyers:
All users must register for your auctions. Once registered, they will appear in your Contacts Section. Registrations help track returning customers and gauge the popularity of your auctions as the number of registrations grows.
By default, the Auto Approve Buyers feature is enabled, allowing buyers to register for your auction without your intervention. If disabled, non-pre-approved buyers must request approval before bidding. You can manually approve or reject each customer from the "Registration" section of your auction:
Pre-approved buyers can be added in the auction settings using tags. By grouping buyers in the "Customer" section with specific tags, you can easily pre-approve them for your auctions.
Example: If you want to manually approve all new buyers, you can tag existing customers as “Previous Customers” in the "Customer" section and add this tag to your pre-approved list.
Pickup & Shipping
Here you can adjust your fulfillment method for this auction, just like in your global settings. These values will populate with what you set in your global fulfillment settings, but can be changed on a per auction basis. Pickup instructions can also be updated if this auction requires a different location or method of pickup. There's a checkbox at the bottom to update your global settings in case you decide to move forward with the fulfillment settings you changed for this auction.
Banner
This is where you can give a little personality to your auction and describe it for your buyers. You can give a title and description of your auction, along with a call to action to take users to an external link.
The banner settings can be seen above (left image) with how it will show up on the auction once it's live (right image).
Team
This section allows your to assign listers to your auction from your team. You can add members to your team in the global settings. Like the title describes, listers will only be able to add items to the auction, they won't be able to change any auction settings.
Bid Increments
With our auctions you have full control over the amount that a single bid increases the price of an item, along with the price level where the bid amount increases.
The image below shows the bid increment chart and it's default values. The right column shows the amount a single bid will increase the item price, while the left column is the price where the bid amount will change to the value in the row below.
Example: In the above image, if an item starts at $15, each bid will raise the price by $1. Once the item price reaches $15, the bids will start raising the price by $2.
These values can be customized on a per auction basis or in your global settings so you can set and forget. Click the pencil button to edit the values, you can also add and remove values to customize this to your liking.
Example: The bid increment chart above is set up so that the bid amount will always be $5
This should equip you with all the information you need for fine-tuning your auctions. Now you can start listing items, check out our Listing Items article for an in-depth view. We are constantly growing, so this article will be updated as new features are added to our platform.