Amazing Auction Enhancements

Updated to work with E-commerce Version 3 for Drupal 4.7
Files at bottom of post. Sorry about that folks! Module still Amazing Things specific in places, needs to be ported to 5 and cleaned up. Sponsors?

2008 Autumn Auction Season Update

• Still 4.7, sigh, and very much containing Amazing Things specific code but some neat improvements:
• Reports sortable and produced as sorted by last name, and first name.
• Prompt already-registered users to complete required fields for registration (using our reinvite module).
• Show total raised (online and live auction) as a percentage of donated goods.

(To hire Agaric Design Collective to install or run an on-line auction, please see our services » web development » auctions page.)

Notice to Drupal users: Auction product sub-module improvements available now, including outbid notification

Agaric Design recently used, and made a number of modification/enhancements to, the auction module of Drupal's E-Commerce project.

It enabled a successful fundraiser for a nonprofit arts center.

We mean to clean up our changes and submit them as patches or helper modules but we haven't yet. So we just wanted people to know about them and to say all code is available as is (attached below) and that a request from anyone who wants a given feature should push us to submit it to the e-commerce project properly. Agaric Design can of course be hired to set up auction sites.

Features Unique to Agaric's modified auction module:

• E-mail people each time they are outbid (my best improvement by far).
• A "My Bids" list for each user
• A total money raised calculation
• An output of each user and the items they won
• An output of each item and the user that won it
• Bid History no longer a link for zero bids-- I think this was a bug in auction.module
• Pre-fill the bid price plus admin-chosen bid-increment dollars in the 'confirm bid' field.
• Minimum bid increment is enforced
• The bid history links back to the item!
• Items have their own name first, not "Bidding History" on top.
• Bid information displays below both the description and (floated) image thumbnails
• Auction can expire based on a date/time set in admin, overriding number of days after post
• SKU shows on public page made an option in administer > settings > zing auction
• Let the high bidder outbid himself or herself
• Will not accept bids more than 1,000 + 10*current bid
• I have turned off display of the high bidder, since we suspect some people are less likely to bid against someone they know-- I can make this an option to turn on or off quite easily. (The information is still available in the Bidding History, but it's not in your face "You would bid against sweet Mrs. Watkins?!?")
• updating the "price" of the product when a bid is made (allows listing by high bid in views)
• ability for user with appropriate access to delete a bid
  /* NOTE THAT (at the moment) THESE TWO FEATURES TOGETHER INTRODUCE A BUG: If a bid is deleted, the "price" stays at the high bid. */
• Additional changes that probably haven't been documented yet.

New features added in 2008

• Bargains listing for items with the biggest dollar spread between estimated value and current bid.
• Used the reinvite module to also send a reminder in the closing days.

See also: advice for running an on-line auction.