Home ›
Advice for running an online auctionAdvice for running an online auction
Submitted by Benjamin Melançon on February 7, 2007 - 2:40pm
People write Agaric for advice, we might as well share our wisdom (if people ask, it implies we have wisdom, right?)
The first year we did this the arts center used the online bids as starting points for the silent auction bids (and then some of the silent auction items went to a live auction). The volunteers found it organizationally challenging, especially in payment/pickup on the spot.
The second year the on-line auction ran, it ended a day and a half before the annual fling, and had no items in common with the live auction (although we featured the items on the auction site, which I didn't like the idea of anyhow and was a headache for /me/ to deal with! -- but it's all in the code now).
I think on-line to silent can work, it sort of depends on the number of your volunteers who can be spared from putting on the event to sorting out auction items. It also means you want to be clear if, say, some items the bidding ends the day or night before the auction, and some will be carried over for silent/live bidding.
Gift certificates, especially to restaurants, did really well. Ironically, for an arts center, art didn't do so well. In general most things were bid to near (or above!) their value, on-line and live, but if you have a lot of big ticket items of uncertain appeal, an overall estimate of earning half your donations is a safe bet.
And of course everything works 27% better when you use Agaric Design to put on your on-line auction.
Comments
Online Auction Stress
"organizationally challenging, especially in payment/pickup"
I am beginning to get involved in a new online auction bizop called Big Ticket Depot, and having never really been involved in something like this before, and not ever having bid on, bought or sold things via eBay, I am stating to wonder if I should be putting my energies into this or just totally steer clear of it. As the name implies, Big Ticket Depot is meant for only big ticket items priced US$1K and up. It has taken a lot longer than initially indicated for the Big Ticket Depot auction site to get up and running, but this might be partly because the founder, Joel Sauceda, and his team decided to first begin another auction site, a related one, Big Value Depot, which opened first and currently has many more categories and listings than Big Ticket Depot. It gets confusing, and I can see that the organizational necessities could certainly be a big ticket headache down the road if it is not properly streamlined now in the beginning. Will it late give eBay some competition and maybe even take some of eBay's buyers and sellers? Hmm . . . .
Post new comment