They don’t bid on any other item, preferring to stand in the crowd, sometimes using their handkerchief, rubbing itchy eyes and adjusting their now cumbersome Texas Ranger hats. Finally, they decide to pay for the purchase and proudly take it home. After you arrive at the checkout, you can run your bid card and get two pages back, an invoice with more than 20 items listed silent auction ideas for several hundred dollars. You can run and race to your home at a top speed of 2.4 miles, return the next evening to pick up your car at midnight, and never participate in an auction again. For a less popular or less unique item, a minimum reach of 30% is recommended. But if you have a big ticket, unique items, set a higher starting bid for those silent auction items.
Or you can keep the starting bids low and set a higher bid increase to make more money and at the same time evaluate these attractively expensive items. Another attractive option for many auction guests is to now offer the purchase price on unique and expensive items. Give bidders the opportunity to purchase high-quality items at an auction at a price slightly below market value, but above their cost of the items. This option ensures that you can make a profit and bidders can easily get attractive auction packages.
Printable bid sheets are the easiest way to handle this transition, but it still takes some time to print out the bid sheets and arrange them on the bid tables at the live event. It is customary to close an online auction a few hours to a day before the start of the live event. Once an item is sold, you can no longer change it to change the shipping cost. Alternatively, you can change the total shipping cost of the invoice.
It’s best to wait for the online auction to complete before downloading the final bid sheets to make sure they contain the highest bid amounts online. Take a look at a selection of bid documents from our demo auction. As soon as the total shipping costs on the invoice have changed, the highest bidder can no longer select the shipping option, but enter the delivery address.
Gradually closing also increases the number of eyes looking at each object. This means that more attention will be paid to the elements, and healthy bidding competition may increase. The best place to start is to look at all the data from previous auctions. If you’ve held live or silent auctions in the past, put together the items that received the highest bids or were the most interested, and see if you can apply these lessons to new items.
Now that you have determined the market value of all your silent auction items, the starting bid is calculated for each item of this value. Look for similar items and compare prices on websites and in stores, if possible. You should set the starting price below the fair market value to show your guests the opportunity to make a good deal.
Requesting an account for bids makes it easier for auction administrators to identify and communicate with bidders during and after the auction. Post frequently about the auction and articles on social media as well. Your online auction is a way to stay in front of your donors with updates when you add items, open your auction and include non-bid items to make sharing easier. You can use bulk messaging services for text and email in your auction program to keep bidders up to date on new items. In addition, encourage bidders to re-share their posts on their profiles.
Currently, there is no way to automatically stop bidding on an item before the auction ends. However, you can manually mark an item as sold at the time you want it to end. To do this, simply click on the item tag as Sold link in the Item Control menu on the Auction Items page.
For all other items on the invoice, the amount of another item will be used. This way you can take advantage of the combined shipping discount, if available. If an item receives an offer within the last 3 minutes of the auction, the expiration time of the item will be extended to allow another 3 minutes of bidding. If you extend the auction, extended bid messages will be displayed throughout the auction with a link that allows you to easily view all extended items.