Timed and live,
on one ledger.
Most platforms make you choose: a timed online sale, or a webcast with an auctioneer. Hammer runs both from the same bid ledger, the same increment ladder and the same invoice — because the only real difference between them is who says the hammer has fallen.
Genie GS-1930 scissor lift
Current bid
$1,850.00
7 bids from 3 bidders · reserve met
Closes in
1:48
Extended — a late bid moved the close
A bid in the last two minutes pushes the close out, and pushes every lot behind it with the same hand. Nobody wins by having the fastest connection.
A bid is not a copy of something kept somewhere else. It is an offer to enter a contract, made by a named person at a recorded moment — and nothing else anywhere holds it.
The design principle
So the ledger is append-only. Nothing in Hammer updates or deletes a bid; a withdrawal is a reversal written beside the original, and the price, the high bidder, whether the reserve is met and what the invoice says are all computed from that ledger rather than stored beside it.
It means a sale can be reconstructed from the record afterwards, line by line — which is what you need on the day somebody disputes one.
Built around the ninety seconds that decide the price.
Everything else in an auction platform is catalogue management. This is the part that has to be right.
A soft close that cascades
A bid inside the last two minutes extends the lot — and pushes the lots behind it far enough that a bidder who was just outbid still has time to react. Without the cascade, sniping simply moves to the next lot along.
Proxy bidding that keeps its secret
Bidders set a maximum; the ladder spends as little of it as it must. That maximum is never shown to another bidder, in any response, on any page — it is the one number that decides the price.
A rostrum for live sales
Floor, phone and internet bids land in one ledger with one ladder. The auctioneer's console has its own credential, scoped to one sale, revocable mid-auction — because it is a borrowed laptop in a room full of strangers.
Your terms, not ours.
Two houses we studied while building this disagree about almost everything — premium, format, how bidders are vetted. Both are right, so the platform holds the difference rather than picking.
- Buyer's premium
- Flat, banded, or marginal tiers — with an optional discount for certified funds. On a $600,000 hammer, banded and marginal differ by $25,000, so the platform asks which you mean instead of assuming.
- Tax and fees
- Charged on the hammer or on hammer plus premium, per your jurisdiction. Lot fees and invoice fees, fixed or as a rate.
- Settlement
- Invoice and wait for a wire, hold a card and capture by hand, or capture at close. Chosen per sale — a court-ordered surplus sale and a weekly consumer sale want opposite answers.
- Arithmetic
- Every amount is a whole number of cents and every rate a whole number of basis points. Nothing in an invoice has been through a floating-point number, and the premium rounds once, in one place.
- Invoices
- One per buyer per sale, frozen when issued. Editing a fee afterwards does not silently rewrite a document somebody already has.
Four credentials, kept apart.
A bidder's session, an auction house's API key, an auctioneer's console token and a payment processor's signature are four different things, and none of them can do another's job.
- Each house has its own database. A query cannot reach another house's bids because they are not in the same file.
- Credentials are stored hashed, and payment secrets are encrypted at rest. A stolen database yields nothing that works.
- A bidder never sees another bidder's maximum, or your reserve, or who they are bidding against.
- The auctioneer's console is revocable mid-sale and goes dark within a heartbeat.
- Every administrative action is recorded with who did it and when.
Tell us about your sale.
We set houses up one at a time, and we would rather understand what you sell before you type a catalogue into anything. There is no self-serve signup and no card required.
Apply to run a sale