Online Bidding Platforms - Part 1

This is a post I've been wanting to do for a while, but I've been wanting to do it right. In order to do so, I'm going to break it up into multiple posts, for better clarity.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the industry term, a Live Simulcast auction, is an auction in which bidding occurs through an online portal alongside of either live onsite/in-house bidding, or multiple online portal sites. As an example, think of a local auctioneer, holding a sale in their building. There may be 75 or even 300+ bidders there on location (depending on the auction & auctioneer). At that sale, imagine a ringperson accepting phone bids on a call-in line. He or she can accept a single call at a time, taking a single bid at a time from each call. In order to take multiple bids on a telephone at once, you would have to have a large number of employees & a bank of phones. Not.Cost.Effective. The modern equivalent of phone bidding, is online bidding. There are a whole host of sites which let auction companies market their cataloged sales to an interested public, typically involving a flat per auction fee to the auctioneer, along with a percentage of the gross sales total from that auction. There are also other fees which can become involved, typically for extra marketing efforts for the benefit of a particular auction on behalf of the online bidding platform. With the addition of an online bidding platform, the same auctioneer who had live competition on his lotted items from 75-300 people, can now effectively spread his marketing on those items to ANYONE IN THE WORLD WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION. This is a no-brainer. If you have the technical expertise to create a spreadsheet, and can successfully manage your data, you can vastly increase competition, and therefore prices realized, on the items you are selling.

At Mound City Auctions, we've used 3 different online bidding platforms for live simulcast auctions & for online only timed auctions - Proxibid, iCollector, and LiveAuctioneers. Each has its merits, and each its flaws. Additionally, there are several other live online or timed internet only bidding applications to choose from. What my goal over the next several posts is, is to review the three that I've personally used, as well as take a look at others used in the industry.