The auction technology partner · 27 years
Online auction software for auction houses — live, timed and white-label
Auction Experts is the auction technology partner for established European auction houses that want to build and own their own platform. We provide the bid engine, the back office and the APIs — including the auction logic nobody wants to rebuild from scratch — so you can concentrate on your brand, your lots and your clients. Fixed licence, no commission on the hammer price, no marketplace lock-in.
The platform, in six parts
All features →Real-time bidding from any website, app or external platform. Built for the last sixty seconds of an auction.
02 The ManagerBack office for consignment, lots, catalogue, bidders, invoicing and translations.
03 Two APIsA public API for your own front end, and an integration API for your back office and finance systems.
04 Event systemEvery bid, registration and lot close as an event you can subscribe to — feed it into your CRM.
05 White-label appsYour own native iOS and Android apps, in your branding, on the same platform.
06 AuthenticationOAuth 2.0 with single sign-on across every site, app and back-office tool you run.
What Auction Experts is
Auction Experts is white-label auction software: a complete online auction platform supplied as a hosted service to auction houses, liquidators, dealers and charities. The buyer-facing auction website carries your logo, colours and domain — bidders never see the Auction Experts name. Behind it sits an auction management system where your team creates auctions, catalogues lots, manages bidders, runs the live sale and issues invoices.
The platform supports four auction formats: timed online auctions, live auctions with a remote bidding console, sealed-bid auctions, and Dutch auctions. A single auction house can run all four from the same back office.
Auction Experts is developed and operated from Amsterdam, and has supplied auction software for twenty-seven years.
The model
A fixed licence, not a share of your hammer.
Marketplaces and portals take a percentage of every hammer price. That is a permanent tax on your own success: the better your sale performs, the more you hand over, and it never ends. A fixed licence inverts it. Your platform costs are known in advance and do not grow with your turnover, so growth accrues to you rather than to your platform.
The part that compounds is not the money. On a marketplace, the bidder relationship belongs to the marketplace — the email address, the bidding history, the preferences. On your own platform, every sale makes the next one easier, because you know who to tell.
Pricing
What it costs
Auction Experts is priced as a monthly subscription plus a one-off implementation fee. There are two plans:
| Plan | Implementation (one-off) | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Professional | from €2,450 | €720 |
| Enterprise | on request | on request |
Professional
A customised auction website under your own brand, with the Manager back office, customised email and invoice templates, all bidding types, payment provider integration, training, and multiple administrator accounts.
Enterprise
Everything in Professional, plus a full white-label website with CMS, REST API access, VIES VAT validation, SMS verification, the event system, a custom payment provider, native mobile apps, unlimited lot types, and subscription and deposit handling.
All plans are billed monthly. Implementation is invoiced once, at the start. Prices exclude VAT.
The difference
Most auction software vendors serve one segment. We serve twelve.
A platform built for a single market picks up that market's assumptions. Art auction software assumes provenance and estimates. Car auction software assumes VIN numbers and inspection reports. Neither survives contact with a liquidation sale of factory equipment across three warehouses.
For twenty-seven years we have run auctions across the full range, on one codebase. That is why the platform bends instead of breaking when a customer's business changes.
Who runs on it
From exclusive single-house platforms to Europe's largest portals.
The same platform runs a curated wine auction with a few hundred exacting bidders, and a vehicle portal absorbing a traffic spike in the closing minute. That range is the point.
A selection of the auction houses the platform has carried, past and present. Also built for Troostwijk and BVA when they were the largest auction portals in Europe.
What you can run on it
Timed online auctions
Lots open and close on their own schedule, with per-lot start and end times ranging from a few hours to several days. Bidders place a maximum bid and Auction Experts bids incrementally on their behalf up to that limit. Staggered closing times and automatic extension keep late bidding competitive.
Live auctions
The auctioneer runs the sale from a live console while remote bidders follow by video stream and bid in real time. Absentee bids, sealed bids and telephone bids entered before the sale are shown to the auctioneer in the same view as the floor.
Sealed-bid and Dutch auctions
Sealed bids stay hidden from other bidders until the lot closes. Dutch auctions open high and step down until a bidder accepts. Both run on the same bidding engine as timed and live sales.
The auction management system
Every phase of the sale runs in one back office:
- Intake — consignment records with QR-coded lot tracking from arrival to release.
- Catalogue — lot creation individually, by batch upload, or through the REST API, with export to print and PDF catalogues.
- Pre-bid — online bids, absentee bids, telephone bids and offers, all visible before the sale opens.
- Live — the auctioneer console, video stream and remote bidding.
- After-sale — unsold lots moved to a post-auction sale or a following auction without re-cataloguing.
- Invoicing — invoices generated automatically with buyer's premium, VAT and shipping, and connected to your payment provider.
- Reporting — auction reporting and analytics on bidding activity, results per lot and per category, and bidder engagement.
How it connects to your systems
Auction Experts exposes a REST API for lot creation, lot updates, bidder records and results, so an existing back-office, ERP or stock system stays the source of truth. Authentication uses OAuth 2.0 and supports single sign-on. An event system fires webhooks on auction and lot events — sale closed, lot sold, bidder registered — so you can trigger your own automations without custom development on our side.
The platform runs as SaaS on Microsoft Azure with dynamic scaling and 24/7 monitoring. There is nothing to install and no server for you to maintain.
Who uses it
Auction Experts runs auctions in art and antiques, wine and whiskey, luxury goods, cars, audiovisual equipment, real estate, liquidation and insolvency, overstock, industrial machinery, agriculture, and transport and heavy vehicles.
More than twenty-five auction houses run on the platform; customers include VH Auctions, Bright Auctions and Best Wine Auctions.
Why it holds up
Twenty-seven years of auctions, on Azure.
Auction traffic is not like other traffic. Nothing happens for six days, then every bidder arrives in the same sixty seconds. We have been engineering for that curve for twenty-seven years — first for Troostwijk and BVA when they were the largest auction portals in Europe, and since then for auction houses across twelve segments.
The platform runs on Microsoft Azure with automatic scaling, so capacity follows the curve rather than the average. Monitoring is continuous, and the architecture is a set of cloud services you can deploy in whichever combination fits.
Three ways to run it
The platform meets your website where it is.
Hosted template
A website we host and style to your brand. Fastest route to a working auction.
Alongside your site
The auction runs on our platform and sits next to your existing website.
Full integration
You build the front end against our API. The platform becomes infrastructure.
Frequently asked questions
What is white-label auction software?
White-label auction software is an auction platform that runs under your brand instead of the vendor's. Bidders see your logo, your colours and your domain; the vendor's name appears nowhere in the buying experience. Auction Experts supplies the auction website, the bidding engine, the back office and the mobile apps this way, so an auction house can launch a branded online auction platform without building or hosting software itself.
Can we keep our existing website?
Yes. Auction Experts can be deployed three ways: as a hosted auction website using a template, as an auction section added to your existing website, or fully integrated into your own infrastructure through the API.
Does it work on mobile?
The auction website is responsive on phones and tablets, and native mobile bidding apps are available for iOS and Android under your own brand and listed under your own name in the App Store and Google Play.