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Comparison
Auction software compared: marketplace, white-label platform, or build your own
There are three ways to run online auctions, and choosing between them is mostly one decision — who owns the relationship with the bidder. Everything else follows from that.
This page compares the three categories rather than named products. Feature tables comparing specific vendors go out of date within weeks, and an out-of-date comparison is worse than none. What follows is the structural difference between the routes, which does not change.
The three routes
An auction marketplace
You list your lots on a platform that also lists other sellers'. The marketplace brings its own audience of registered bidders, and takes a share of what you sell — usually a percentage of hammer, sometimes plus a listing fee. Your lots appear under the marketplace's brand alongside your competitors'.
White-label auction software
You license a platform that runs under your own brand and domain. Bidders register with you, and the vendor's name does not appear. You pay a subscription and usually an implementation fee, and you supply the audience yourself.
Building your own
You commission or employ developers to build an auction platform. You own the code and control everything, and you carry the full cost of building it and of keeping it running.
Compared directly
| Marketplace | White label | Build your own | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who owns the bidder | The marketplace. You reach your buyers through them. | You. Registrations, bidding history and contact details are in your database. | You, entirely. |
| Whose brand bidders see | Theirs, with your name as the seller. | Yours — domain, design, emails, invoices, apps. | Yours. |
| Upfront cost | Little or none. | An implementation fee. Auction Experts charges from €2,450. | The highest of the three, and the hardest to estimate before starting. |
| Ongoing cost | A share of every lot sold — so the cost rises with your success. | A fixed subscription. Auction Experts Professional is €720 per month, with Enterprise on request. | Developer time, hosting and maintenance, indefinitely. |
| Time to launch | Fastest — you are listing on something that already exists. | Weeks to months, depending on how custom the design is. | Longest by a wide margin. |
| Control over terms | Limited. Buyer's premium, payment terms and presentation are largely set for you. | Yours. Premium, bid steps, VAT treatment and payment provider are your settings. | Total. |
| Who maintains it | The marketplace. | The vendor. Updates arrive without a project. | You — including the bidding engine under load, VAT rules and payment integrations. |
| Where the audience comes from | The marketplace supplies it. | You supply it. | You supply it. |
Which suits which auction house
A marketplace suits you if you have no bidder list. If nobody yet knows your sales exist, paying commission for access to an existing audience is a reasonable trade, and it is much better than a branded platform nobody visits. The cost is that you are renting the customer relationship, and the rent does not stop.
White label suits you if you already have buyers. An established saleroom with a mailing list and returning bidders is paying commission for people it introduced to the marketplace in the first place. Moving them onto your own platform converts a variable cost into a fixed one and puts the bidder database back in your hands.
Building suits you if the auction is your product. If you are a technology business whose competitive advantage is the bidding experience itself, buying someone else's is odd. For an auction house whose advantage is expertise, consignments and reputation, building the software is a large investment in something your customers do not judge you on.
The pattern we see most often
Houses start on a marketplace, build a bidder list, and then notice how much of their turnover leaves as commission. They move to white label and keep the marketplace as one channel among several rather than the whole shopfront. Very few move the other way.
The two are not exclusive. Auction Experts customers commonly run their own branded platform and also push lots to marketplaces such as Invaluable and Lot-tissimo for extra reach, with their own site as the place the relationship lives.
Where Auction Experts sits
Auction Experts is white-label auction software — the middle column. It is not a marketplace and will not bring you an audience. It supplies the auction website, the bidding engine, the back-office auction management system and native mobile apps under your brand, for timed, live, sealed-bid and Dutch auctions, hosted on Microsoft Azure and running for twenty-seven years.
If you want the detailed evaluation questions rather than the category comparison, the buyer's guide covers what to ask a vendor.