Building an online auction website is a great way to get a competitive edge in the market.
Why an online auction website could be beneficial for your business?
It’s a win-win deal for both sellers & buyers.
For the sellers, it becomes easier to sell their products at the desired prices.
On the other hand, the buyers get an opportunity to watch out and hunt for the best yet affordable deals.
Is it expensive to build an online auction store?
Not at all. Especially, with the help of a CMS platform such as WordPress, you can develop your online auction store at an affordable cost. Additionally, you can also hire Indian website builders who can help you to create your e-commerce store at an amazingly low cost.
If you too are looking for an online auction website, this blog post may help you.
Here, we have shared 7 essential features that your online auction store must have.
Let’s get started.
#1 Incremental bidding
This is a very useful feature that your eCommerce developer could integrate with your online auction store.
The Incremental bidding feature allows you to define an amount that your online bidders can choose with each raise in the current highest bid.
Let’s understand the concept of incremental bidding with an example.
If you are selling a mobile phone on your auction-based store and the minimum price for this mobile phone is $700 and the current highest bid is $800.
When you set the value of incremental bidding as $50, the next bidder can choose the bid value only in the multiples of $50.
So, in the above case, the bidder can only offer their bid at $750, $800, and so on.
#2 Last-minute bid extension
This is yet another great feature that your website builder can integrate with your online auction e-commerce store.
The Last-minute bid feature will extend the end-time of your auction if any shopper has bid within a specific duration of time before the auction’s expiry.
For instance, if the auction for any product on your website is going to end in the next 15 minutes and a user has just bid on that product, the expiry time of this auction can be extended to a further 3 hours or any other desired number of hours.
What are the benefits of last-minute bid extensions?
- The users get more time to bid on the products.
- The sellers get a chance to receive a better bid.
- It’s done automatically so no need to change the auction’s end-time manually.
#3 Buying price
Even if you intend to sell your products on auction and invite the online shoppers to bid on your products, you must also allow your users to pay the buying price if they are willing to purchase the product without getting into the bidding process.
Sometimes, your customers may like your product(s) so much that they may not want to wait to win the bid. Instead, they may be willing to purchase it right away.
Therefore, you can ask your website builder to provide you with an option to mention the buying price of each product along with the usual bidding features.
#4 Reverse auction
In usual auctioning, the sellers set a price for their products and allow the buyers to bid on them however in the case of a reverse auction, the customers set a price for any product that they are willing to purchase and the sellers bid on these products.
In the case of a reverse auction, the sellers who bid the lowest price to sell an item win and will be able to sell their product.
Therefore, each seller will try to bid on their products as low as possible.
#5 Proxy bidding
How does proxy bidding work?
In the case of proxy bidding, while bidding their offer price for any product, your online shoppers will also be able to mention a price that they are willing to pay as their highest bid for that product.
This highest bid amount of any user will not be publicly visible to the other users.
For example, while bidding for a mobile phone, John may like to input $600 as his current bidding price, but he can also mention his highest bidding amount for eg. $700 in this case.
So, if the next bidder raises the current highest bid to an amount that is more than $600 but less than $700, the system will automatically raise the bidding of John so that there will be a higher chance for John to win the auction.
#6 Adding normal products
Even if you run an online auction website, sometimes you may need to sell some of your product(s) at a fixed price too. Therefore, your web developer must provide you with an option to publish a product without the auction feature, which means selling it at a fixed price.
Additionally, you can also have a different section for just auction-based products and a different one for normal products. It will help you to run different kinds of experiments on which products are sold more at a normal price and which ones are on the bidding.
#7 Bidding fee
You may also charge a nominal bidding fee to all of your online shoppers who are willing to participate in the auction. It will make sure that you get offers from online serious bidders.
Your website builder can force your online shoppers to pay a nominal bidding price in order to offer their bids.
You may keep this bidding fee refundable or non-refundable, depending upon your business-specific requirements.
Here are some of the benefits that you charging a bidding fee may provide you:
Here are the advantages of asking for a bidding fee:
- You get only serious bidders for the auction.
- You can easily cover your administration expenses.
