Product · The auction technology partner · 27 years
The Auction Experts online auction platform
Auction Experts is a cloud-based online auction platform made of four parts: the bidder-facing auction website, the real-time bidding engine, the back-office auction management system, and the native mobile apps. They are supplied together as a hosted service, and every part can be branded as your own.
What is in the platform
All features →- Bid engine Real-time bidding, automatic bids, sealed bids, lot extension, simultaneous-bid resolution.
- The Manager Consignment intake, lot and catalogue management, bidder administration, invoicing, translations.
- Front-end API and integration API Build your own front end; connect your back office, ERP and accounting systems.
- Event system Subscribe to platform events. Build bidder profiles in your own CRM.
- White-label apps Native iOS and Android apps in your branding, full auction functionality.
- Authentication service OAuth 2.0, single sign-on across bidder-facing and staff-facing applications.
- Content management Pages, content and translations for the public site, managed from the back office.
- Architecture and hosting How it runs on Azure, and how it handles the closing minute of an auction.
Coverage
The full auction lifecycle, not a slice of it.
| 01 | Consignment | Intake from first contact with the consignor, lot data enrichment, labels and consignor contracts. |
| 02 | Cataloguing | Category order, images and metadata per lot, lot ordering, XML export for the printed catalogue. |
| 03 | Pre-bidding | Publication to your site and connected marketplaces. Phone bids, absentee bids, offers below limit, registration and approval. |
| 04 | Auction | Timed, live with video, sealed, Dutch, private and hybrid formats. Real-time bidding from web, app or external site. |
| 05 | After sale | Unsold lots to after sale at limit price or by offer, moved to a later auction, or returned to the consignor. |
| 06 | Settlement | Buyer and consignor invoicing with commissions, transport and costs. Automated mail and reminders. Payment providers connected. |
| 07 | Afterwards | Bid results and invoices exported to your finance system over the API. |
The parts most platforms do not have
Every claim below is one line in the full feature list; they are named here because almost no competitor has them, and buried in a list of 259 you might not look for them.
- Hall bidders, paddle registration and caller assignment for live sales, and phone bids alongside the room.
- Combination lots, sealed bidding and Dutch descending-price auctions, on the same engine as timed and live.
- VIES VAT validation and multi-country VAT and cost rules, including the margin scheme and intra-community supply.
- Consignor settlement produced in the same run as buyer invoicing, and Peppol e-invoicing.
- Catalogue printing with page layout and XML export to print design tools.
- The Lot-tissimo and Invaluable integrations, with bids tracked back to their channel.
- A translation module covering the website, the back office, the emails and every category name.
AI on the platform
Live today: the Auction Experts AI Connector. The platform exposes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so an auction house connects the assistant it already uses — Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP client — straight to its own environment. Staff ask questions of their own auctions, lots, bids, bidders, costs and invoices in plain language instead of building a report, and the assistant reads a written guide to the data, so it answers with the auction house’s own definitions. This runs in production against real auction data; it is not a pilot.
Also live: the assistant does the work. With permission and a preview every time, it catalogues lots from their photos and descriptions, maps a consignor’s spreadsheet onto a lot type and imports it, creates auctions and puts them online, re-offers unsold lots, and writes translations, e-mail templates and settings. Bids, invoices and members stay with a person, in the back office.
We also use AI in our own onboarding, support and development, which is why a new customer environment now goes live faster than it used to.
Three ways to deploy it
Auction Experts is not a single fixed product. The choice does not change the back office.
- Hosted auction website. We supply the bidder-facing site on your domain, from a template with your branding or as a fully custom design.
- Added to your existing website. The auction section is embedded into the site you already run, so your main site stays where it is.
- Full integration. Your systems drive the platform through the REST API and you build your own front end on top of it.
Platform & integration
For your developer or IT lead.
- Hosting Microsoft Azure, dynamic scaling, 24/7 monitoring
- Integration REST API — lots, bidders, results
- Auth OAuth 2.0, single sign-on
- Events Webhooks on auction and lot events
- Content Built-in CMS, multilingual
Every auction type
The bidding engine supports timed online auctions, live auctions with remote bidding, sealed-bid auctions and Dutch auctions. Reserve prices, buyer's premium, per-lot bid steps, staggered closing and automatic extension are configured per auction or per lot.