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About Auction Crafters
Online Auctions Are Too Expensive!If you do an internet search for "online auction" you will find dozens of auction providers who will either charge a substantial one-time up-front fee for running an auction or charge a smaller one-time fee plus either a fee for each item in the auction and/or a percentage of the final total amount that the auction earns. For many smaller auctions, that can mean that a significant decrease in the net amount that the auction brings in.
We Offer An AlternativeYou can raise funds for your organization, club, school, church group or cause by running your own limited-duration online auction!
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No additional costs for auction item payment processing – you contact winning bidders to arrange for payment and item pickup/delivery
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if you wish, you can brand all your auction pages with your logo
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You can manage all aspects of your auction:
- item images and description
- item retail value
- item donor or provider
- minimum item bid
- required bid increment
- auction start and end dates
- the information that bidders see when they visit your auction
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You can offer up to 100 items for online bidding
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You can run your auction for up to 30 consecutive days
One-time cost for each auction if paid in 2020:
$50 for up to 20 items
$100 for up to 50 items
$200 for up to 100 items
To build an auction for your organization,
just click below:
(we reserve the right to terminate any auction that offers items that are either illegal or that conflict with usual community standards – the only auction items that we expressly prohibit are firearms and explosives) -
No additional costs for auction item payment processing – you contact winning bidders to arrange for payment and item pickup/delivery
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Tips For A Successful Auction
1 Engage Your Community
All too often, an organization will invite only members or people already closely associated with the organization to participate in their auction. To maximize your auctions proceeds, invite as many people as possible to bid on the items that you are offering.
Consider sending an advance notice of your auction to area churches and civic organizations.
Post notices of your auction in places that provide areas for public announcements (community centers, libraries, church activity areas, grocery stores, etc.).
If your local newspaper provides weekly or monthly free advertising for non-profits, let them tell readers about your event.
This "spreading of the word" will not only increase the likelihood that your auction will bring in more money, but it will raise your community's awareness of your organization or cause.
2 Offer Good Stuff
No matter how many people know about your auction and visit your auction bidding page, it won't matter if the items that you are offering are not appealing. Sometimes an organization will rush to run an auction without giving enough advance though to what they will offer or to how they will show their items. Our auction system allows you to upload images of your auction items and it use those images with the descriptive information that you enter for each item.
Make sure that the things on which you want people to bid are things that most people will be interested in having, and then make sure that you use at least one attractive image of each item and some compelling accompanying verbiage to describe that item.3 Offer Only One Of Each Item
Do not offer multiples of the same item. The whole idea of an auction is to have bidders compete for an item. If you have more than one of a given item available, it decreases the incentive for interested bidders to engage in competitive bidding for any one of those items. Your bidders will also subconsciously consider that item to be of lesser value (how can this be worth having if there are so many of them?).
4 Consider Shipping Costs
Even if you confine the advertising of your auction to your local community, it may well be that word of your auction will spread to someone outside your area who will want to bid on your items. While it's fine to state on your registration/bidding page that winning bidders must come to some location in your area to pick up their item(s), doing that will probably keep "outsiders" from participating in your auction, and may lead to less competitive bidding on your items.
Take a bit of time to find the lowest cost shipping service for the things in your auction, and if the costs are not too excessive, consider adding them to the starting (minimum) required bids for each item. If you aren't comfortable with adding the costs to your starting bid requirements, then you'll at least be prepared to tell winning bidders what the added shipping cost will be if they can't come to pick up their item(s).
5 Shorter Is Better Than Longer
People tend to get bored with an auction that drags on forever. People are also usually very busy, and may simply forget about your auction if it goes on too long.
Though our system allows you to run your auction for as many as 30 days, in our experience 14 days seems to be about right for an auction to run.
6 Remind Bidders About Your Auction
As we said in the previous tip, people are busy. Someone may well place a bid on one of your items and then simply forget about it.
Since our system provides you with the email addresses of your registered bidders, you might consider sending an email message to them about one week into your auction, advising them of the date that your auction closes and urging them to return to the auction to check on the status of their bids (which they can do on the bidding page).
7 Find A Sponsor
Though the cost of running your auction with our auction system is low, you may want to find a sponsor who will donate the money to cover that cost. You can add text to your auction registration/entry page to recognize such a sponsor, thereby giving them a bit of advertising (if they are a business) in exchange for their donation. -
Demonstration Auction
One of the most important aspects of any online auction is the way that the auction looks and "behaves" when a bidder first registers, when they enter the auction, and when they place bids. So that our potential auction clients can see for themselves how our auctions operate from a bidder's perspective, we provide an ongoing demonstration auction.
We encourage you to visit the demonstration auction and give it a try. For this demo, you don't have to enter your real name or real email address when registering – no one will actually "win" and no one will be contacted. Register, make a bid or two, check your bids, exit the auction, return to the auction and make another bid, etc. In other words, play with it until you're satisfied.
(the demonstration auction will open in a new browser window or tab) -
Auction Administrator Login
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Purchase An Auction
We Try To Make It EasyOur goal is to make purchasing our auction services as easy as our auction system is to use. We require that payment be made to us via check – we keep the costs of our auctions low in part by not incurring the overhead of an electronic payment processor. We know that you probably found us by way of an internet search (even better, perhaps a satisfied client referred our services!). In any event, you likely don't know us and have no reason to trust us enough to pay us in advance for services you have't received. We understand, so we'll choose to trust you!
Use Before You PayWe will provide you a fully configured online auction area, tailored with your organization's name and, at your option, its logo. You will be able to begin adding auction items and tailoring the text that your potential bidders see on your auction's registration/bidding entry page. All we ask it that you send us a check for the service level (50 or 100 items) that you selected within three weeks of the date and time that your auction system is created. Prior to (and, of course, following) our receipt of your payment, all your auction's administrative functions will be available for you to use. However, until payment is received no one will be able either to register as a bidder in your auction or to place bids on your items.
Here Are The Steps1 You will be asked to provide your billing/contact information, including your organization's name, and to select your desired level of service (an auction of up to 50 or 100 items). In this step you will see a verification code that you will need to remember or record for use later (recalling that code is very important). You will not be asked for credit/debit card information since we only accept payment by check.
2 After completing the first step you will be asked to provide the information needed for our system to create the image that will appear at the top of both your auction's bidder registration/auction entry page and your auction administration page. In this step you will have the opportunity to➙ modify the text that will be used in that page header – the organization name that you provided in the first step serves as the default text unless you modify it;3 When you have provided all the information needed for the creation of the header image you will click a button that causes that image to be built. You will be able to preview the image that our system creates, and you will be able to continue modifying all that information and recreating the image until you are satisfied with its appearance.
➙ (optionally) upload up to two logo images to be incorporated into that page header image;
➙ change the font that will be used for the text in the header image;
➙ change the color of the text in the header image;
➙ change the orientation of any uploaded logo(s) relative to the text in the header image.
4 When you satisfied with the way the header image looks, you will be able to "accept" the image. At this point, a verification email message will be sent to the email address that you provided in the billing/contact information step. That email message will contain instructions for continuing your auction space creation process. We inject this email step into the process in an attempt to stop (or slow down) hackers and webbots that might try to misuse our auction creation system.
5 When you have successfully verified yourself by following the instructions in the email message that we sent you, you will click a button that completes the creation of your online auction space. Once your auction space is ready, you will be provided the access information for your auction administration page and the web address (URL) of the page to which you will direct bidders for registration and bidding.
6 Another email message will be sent to the email address that you provided. That email message will contain a copy of all the access information relating to your auction and will contain information on the billing/payment procedure and an attached invoice PDF file.
7 Your online auction area is now ready for you, as the administrator, to begin adding auction items and tailoring the text that your potential bidders will see on your auction's registration/bidding entry page.
So – in as little as 15 minutes or so you can go from having no online auction capability to being ready to enter the items on which you want people to bid.
There is no initial obligation on your part. If you would like to try our auction system, then just click the button below.
If, after working with your auction administrator page and entering items, you decide that you don't like using our system, then simply don't send us the required payment as directed on the invoice. In that sad event your auction area will be automatically removed from our servers and the experiment will have cost you nothing more than a bit of your time. We believe that you'll like what you see and will want to send your payment and run your auction!
technical support and operational management by the light weaver group