This article covers all of our auction settings
General Settings
These are the most important settings that define your auction type. Most of these cannot be changed once the auction has been launched, so be sure to double check them before launching your auction.
Bidding Type
One of the most important settings for your auction. There are currently two options, and they cannot be change once the auction is live.
Open Bidding is your standard auction bidding format where all bids and prices are visible to customers. Best used for individual items, or if you have many listings in your auction you're trying to move quickly. You may not be able to sell the item at your target price if it only receives a few bids.
Blind Bidding hides bids and prices from buyers. They can offer any amount for your listings. Best used when you are selling individual pallets containing large quantities of items, or you want to see what kind of offers you receive from customers. You have more freedom to choose the price but may receive a lower amount of bids.
Launching and Closing
Your auction can either launched manually after listing your items or by setting an Auction Goes Live At date. You can set a date and time for you auction to launch on its own. Make sure to have everything set by your set date and time to avoid having to cancel and remake your auction.
First Listing Closes At is essentially the same as auction close time. Our auctions feature staggered closings, meaning items will close one by one every 20 seconds from the previous. This of course may vary if a bidding war is occurring on an item last minute, as our auctions also feature popcorn bidding (items will slightly increase their closing time if bids are being placed near their closing time).
Conditions Scale
One of our unique ways to customize your selling experience, the Conditions Scale feature allows you to create custom scales of conditions for your auctions. You can create different types of conditions scales to use depending on the types of products you're listing.
Creating a conditions scale is easy, the example below shows the creation process of a conditions scale for cell phones and tablets. You can add and remove scales, along with title and describe them.
When bulk uploading items using a CSV file, within it, you can use the names you've created in the listing conditions column to define the condition of each item. Buyers will see the item condition on the listing cards and the listing page in the buyer portal.
Offer Less
The Offer Less feature allows buyers to place on offer below the starting bid if no bids have been placed yet. This feature can be especially useful when selling pallets of items, as you may want to see what sort of offers you're receiving. You can manually select whether you want to accept the offer from your Auction Details page while your auction is live. You don't have to wait for the auction to end to accept an offer.
Seller's Fee
Traditionally known as Buyer's Premium, the Seller's Fee is a fee buyers pay on top of their order, applied when a customer is completing their order. You can set the percentage of the order value you want the seller fee to be.
You view all the fees featured in our platform on our Fees Page.
Registration & Privacy
These are the second most important settings for your auctions. They define the publicity of your auctions and whether anybody can register for them.
Auction Privacy
We have to options to control the visibility of your auction on our platform:
Public Auctions are visible to all buyers on the platform. Your listings will show up on our listings view along with all other auctions. Whether users can participate in this auctions will be determined by your registration approval settings. Useful for moving merchandise as quickly as possible and accruing more bids by exposing them to the largest amount of buyers.
Private Auctions are hidden from the platform and can only be seen via private link or pre-approved buyers. Some use case examples for private auctions include:
- Giving access to a select list of buyers
- Using them as an incentive to gain subscribers or increasing your mailing list
- Providing access as a reward for conditions such as participating in your auctions
- Selling to buyers that hold a certificate or requirement to purchase your types of items
It's important to note that you can provide a link to your private auction, but still set your registration approvals to request access so you can still control who can and can't participate in your auction.
Registration Approvals
Our auctions require users to register for them. When users register for your auctions, they will show up in your Contacts Section. Registrations are also useful for seeing if you're getting the same customers, and tracking the popularity of your auctions as your number of registrations grow.
By default, Auto Approve buyers will be enabled. This allows buyers to freely register for your auction, requiring no action from you. If disabled, non pre-approved buyers will have to request approval before they can bid. You will have to manually approve or reject each customer from the registrations section of your auction as seen below.
Pre-Approved buyers can be added as well from the auction settings. They are added via tag, so you can group your buyers in the customer section with specific tags and pre-approve them for your auctions.
Example: If you wanted to manually approve all new buyers, you could tag all your customers within the Customer Section as "Previous Customers", and add that 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.