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Auction Admin Tools

Introduction

One of the main features of our auction system are the comprehensive tools available to manage your sale. These covers the following areas:

  • Auction management
  • Lot management
  • Bid management
  • User management
  • Data export
  • Reporting
  • Category management and tagging
  • Content management system for the corporate and general information pages
The following provides greater details of these tools and how these will help you to manage your auction efficiently.

Auction Management

This provides the ability to manage and market a group of lots as one sale. This means lots can be grouped together and time to all finish together (or at staggered intervals). This means bidders will view these items as a complete sale, rather than individual items for sale on an ongoing basis. This is useful in the machinery sector where lots are quite often sold as a result of a factory sale or closure. It is also useful when running themed auctions based around charity events. It may also be that items are being sold together because they can all be attributed together in some other way, for example a seasonal sale.

Auction management allows you to carry out the following tasks:

  • Create or edit an auction
  • Add an auction title and description
  • Add documents for download
  • Specify the start and end date for the auction.
  • Add a logo or picture to help attribute the item to a particular sale
  • Group manage the lots within the auction as Draft/Published/Archived
  • Force users to be registered and approved for the auction before bidding

Lot Management

This provides the ability to manage all aspects of the lots and how they appear on the website. You have control over the following - and these can be customized according to your business requirement:

  • Lot title
  • Lot description
  • Unlimited number of graphics - all auto resized to fit the page layout
  • Lot status - Draft/Published/Archived
  • Bidding Suspended - suspend bidding at any time
  • Overtime bidding period - the period from the end of the auction when bidding will be extended on this lot
  • Start Date/End Date
  • Reserve
  • Bidding Increment
  • Opening Bid
  • Is the lot a featured lot for the front page?
  • Categories and tagging
  • Auction assignment - the auction this lot is being sold under, if any
  • Has the winner been notified - an automatic email is sent out when the bidding closes
  • Has the winner paid for the item - once payment has been made, we record whether the payment was successful or not. This can then be linked in to reporting and releasing of goods to the buyer.

Bid Management

Our software is able to run several types of bidding:

  • Incremental bidding
  • Autobidding
  • Sealed bidding
  • Purchase Now
  • Overtime bidding
We can also run reverse or Dutch auctions if required.

All bidding can be monitored in the admin system. This means the auctioneer can tell at any one time who the bidders are, the current position and who is winning. The following information is available:

  • Bidder name
  • Bid amount
  • Whether the bid placed by autobid
  • Whether the bid active - it can be made inactive if made by a rogue bidder
  • Lot for which the bid was made
  • Bid date and time
  • IP Address of the bidder

User Management

We provide a fine grain control over users who register for bidding. Users have to provide a minimum level of information prior to be allowed to bid. They also have to supply a valid email address which is confirmed prior to becoming active. Users can be managed using the administrator tools and this includes being able to ban the users from bidding. The following information is stored (and this can be customized according your business requirement):

  • First name, surname
  • Username
  • Active - have they confirmed their email address
  • Set user as site admin
  • Set user as banned
  • Address
  • Post Code
  • Phone number, mobile phone number

Data export and reporting

The reporting within the system is flexible and can be customized to provide management information as required. All data created by reporting can be exported as CSV (compatible with Excel) format files. Data can be extracted by a series of filters and search criteria. This means administrators can easily locate lot, user and bids, but filtering by a range of options.

We have also developed some specialist reports, such as a 'Winning Bidder' report. this allows auctioneers to easily manage winners at the end of the auction. Other easily available actions include locating bids per lot, lots per auction and lots per user.

Category Management and tagging

Lots can be divided up in to categories. This helps bidders easily locate and identify lots they wish to purchase. Users can also search for items too. We can also provide an alternative means of locating lots. By using tagging, bidders can locate lots by using keywords to locate similar items across the categories. These categories and tags can be managed using the admin tools.

Content management

Of course on your auction website you wish to convey a little more information above what is for sale. You will want to provide more supporting information to the users. So we have developed a simple content management system allowing administrators to add and edit content held with in the more general pages on the website. You can add news and other information that will be useful to people using the site.