How it works.
Written plainly, because an auction house is trusting this with a sale and deserves to know what it actually does rather than what it is called.
One engine, two formats.
A lot's price is worked out the same way in a webcast sale and a timed sale. The only difference is who declares the hammer: the clock, or a person at a rostrum.
- Increment ladder
- A published table — $5 steps under $500, $25 above, and so on — set per sale. The step is chosen by the current price, so a lot at $495 goes to $500 and not to $520. Bidders memorise these tables; the platform honours them.
- Proxy bidding
- A bidder authorises a maximum. The leader pays one increment above the runner-up, or their own maximum, whichever is less — so committing more does not cost more. Two identical maximums go to whoever reached that number first.
- Soft close
- A rule, not a timer: a lot is closed when its published close has passed and no bid has landed within the extension window. Recomputed from the ledger, so a restart mid-sale cannot lose an extension it was holding in memory.
- The cascade
- A lot that extends holds back the lots behind it. Otherwise a bidder outbid on lot 40 at the last second finds lots 41 to 43 closed while they were reacting — which is the sniping the soft close exists to prevent, arriving by the side door.
- Reserves
- Never shown to a bidder. Whether a lot has one is public; whether it has been met is public; the number is not.
- Live sales
- Lots go on the block one at a time. Floor, phone and internet bids enter the same ledger, and the auctioneer sells or passes — two separate decisions, so a lot announced as passed is never recorded as sold.
- Absentee bids
- Executed by the same proxy engine as everything else, with no separate arbitration to disagree with.
What the day looks like.
Catalogue
Build the sale in the back office: terms, inspection and removal, the premium and tax, the increment ladder, then the lots. Publish when it is right — publishing is the moment the close times become a promise, and the money terms are fixed after it.
Bidders
Anyone can browse. Registering to bid creates an account with a bid limit, and you can require approval before a first bid — the model a court-ordered or high-value sale needs.
Close and settle
Lots close on a stagger, or from the rostrum. Invoices are issued per buyer per sale with premium, fees and tax, and you record a wire or capture a card depending on how you told the platform this sale settles.
What we protect, and what we don't pretend to.
The honest version. Anything a vendor will not tell you plainly about their security is the thing worth asking about twice.
- Separation
- Each auction house has its own database file. Your bidders, your ledger and your credentials are not in a table shared with another house's.
- Credentials
- Only hashes are stored — of API keys, of bidder passwords (scrypt), of session tokens and of the auctioneer's console token. A copy of the database yields nothing that can be used to sign in.
- Payment secrets
- Encrypted at rest with a key held in the server's environment, never in the database. They go in and come back only as their last four characters. Card numbers never reach the platform at all — the processor holds the card and gives us a token.
- What a bidder cannot see
- Another bidder's maximum, your reserve, who they are bidding against, or which email addresses have accounts with you. Bid history shows that a lot is contested — the time and the channel — and never by whom or for how much.
- The pages
- Served with a strict content policy and no third-party scripts, fonts, analytics or trackers — on the bidder's pages and on this one. A page that fetches from somewhere else is a page that breaks when that somewhere else does, in the minute it matters most.
- Monitoring
- The one failure that matters is lots not closing, so the closing job records every successful pass and alerts when it stops. Silence is the thing being watched for.
- Your data
- The bid ledger is yours. It can be exported in full, and there is no upstream system holding a second copy of it — which is also why it is backed up before anything else on the server.
What you'll need.
None of it is difficult, and all of it is yours rather than ours — which is the point. The platform runs the sale; the auction house is the auctioneer.
- Your terms of sale. Premium, payment deadline, and above all the removal deadline — the single most common cause of a buyer who cannot collect what they paid for.
- Whatever licensing your state requires. Auctioneer licensing is state by state in the US, and selling on behalf of consignors is usually the regulated part. The house holds it, not the platform.
- A payment processor account — Square or Stripe — if you want to take cards. Not needed if you settle by wire.
- Your catalogue, with photographs. Lot number, title, description, opening bid and any reserve.
- Somebody to approve bidders, if you want to vet them before their first bid.
Still have questions?
Tell us what you sell and how you sell it. We would rather have that conversation before you type a catalogue into anything.
Apply to run a sale