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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 engineReal-time bidding, automatic bids, sealed bids, lot extension, simultaneous-bid resolution.
- The ManagerConsignment intake, lot and catalogue management, bidder administration, invoicing, translations.
- Public API and integration APIBuild your own front end; connect your back office, ERP and accounting systems.
- Event systemSubscribe to platform events. Build bidder profiles in your own CRM.
- White-label appsNative iOS and Android apps in your branding, full auction functionality.
- Authentication serviceOAuth 2.0, single sign-on across bidder-facing and staff-facing applications.
- Content managementPages, content and translations for the public site, managed from the back office.
- Architecture and hostingHow 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 240 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 MCP layer. The platform exposes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so an AI assistant can connect directly to an auction environment and work with real data — query lots and auctions, check invoices and payment status, create auctions and lots, and read the documentation on the data model. This is running now, in production, against real auction data; it is not a pilot. For an auction house it means staff can ask questions of their own auction data in plain language instead of building a report, and connect their own AI tooling to the platform without waiting for a custom integration.
In development: customer-facing AI features — automation of routine back-office work inside the platform. In development, planned within twelve months; not available today.
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.
- HostingMicrosoft Azure, dynamic scaling, 24/7 monitoring
- IntegrationREST API — lots, bidders, results
- AuthOAuth 2.0, single sign-on
- EventsWebhooks on auction and lot events
- ContentBuilt-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.