Create Your Own Auction Site Using WordPress Auction Plugin / Software

WP Auction Plugin

8.7

Easy to use

9.0/10

Settings

8.5/10

Price

8.4/10

Overall quality

8.8/10

Pros

  • Invoices are automatically sent
  • Pre-populated listing categories
  • Many options for setting up fees
  • Ability to sell digital downloads
  • Anti fraud feature

Cons

  • Only 3 payment gateways
  • Lack of documentation
  • No make an offer feature
  • You can use only one payment gateway at the same time

Looking for a WordPress auction plugin that allows you to host your own auctions? Want to create an eBay style auction site in WordPress?

Getting involved in auctions for products and possibly finding a bargain are a huge draw for most people. It is one of the reasons eBay has been so successful. However, not everyone likes the commissions you have to pay to sell on the site.

What if you love the idea of eBay but want to run an auction from your own site? Or allow others sell their products? You can auction general items or sell specific items at auction.

Creating such a site used to involve custom coding and a huge investment. But not anymore. Anyone with a WordPress site and an auction plugin can have their very own auction site.

Integrating an auction platform into your WordPress website gives you opportunity to sell to the community. Maybe it is not best idea to try beat eBay. But creating WordPress auction website oriented around particular product can be a smart way.

As owner of the website, you get to set the fees and you get to take a piece for yourself. If you have an auction platform that allows users to post items for sale, you get a portion of every sale through the auction platform.

Of course you could host your own auctions on your own site. With this type of auction, you are the only person posting items for bid and your visitors can bid on them.

This allows you to sell through an auction platform without making your visitors find you on a third-party site. Most importantly, you don’t have to share with anyone other than the bank (PayPal, etc.). You can even auction off your services. Or do both. Sell your own auctions, and allow others to sell theirs.

 

Choosing The Right WordPress Auction Plugin

There are couple ways to make an auction site using WordPress. You can get one of the many WordPress auction themes available.

But what if you want to change themes? Maybe you already have the theme you want. A better solution is to use auction WordPress plugin. This way it doesn’t matter which theme you use.

If you already have a theme that you want to use, then it is only left to install a suitable plugin. The right plugin will add all the features and functionality to your WordPress site you need in order to start selling items using the auctioning system.

As this is the most important step in the process of creating an auction site using WordPress, its essential you do some research in order to find a plugin that meets your own personal requirements.

Common features of WordPress auction plugins:

  • Allow users to create accounts and start bidding or listing items
  • Payment gateway integration
  • Email notifications
  • Private messaging
  • Charge a fee for adding a listing
  • Buy now option
  • Show multiple images and detailed descriptions
  • Item search
  • Relist items
  • Reviews

So which plugin can allow all above mentioned and many other features best WordPress auction plugin needs to have? Answer is WP Auction Software plugin.

 

WP Auction Software Review

WP Auction Software is a premium plugin from that has been designed to add auction sale functionality to WordPress. The plugin contains everything that is needed to enable you or your visitors to start listing items for sale on your website on an auction basis. That includes managing the bidding process, and collecting payments from the successful bidder.

 

auction-wordpress-plugin-review

 

The core feature of the WP Auction Software plugin is that it allows you to list and sell items from your WordPress website in the auction format, where visitors can bid against each other in order to try to secure the product or service being listed. The WordPress Auction Plugin integrates with any WordPress theme.

 

WP Auction Plugin User Features

1. Buy and sell products – Site users can participate in auctions or start their own. To start bidding and selling, they just need to register, and start listing items.

2. Digital downloads – You can even sell digital items like product keys, e-books, images, software, etc. No need to worry about delivery of digital goods as auction winner will able to download digital items without your manual intervention.

3. Standard/Penny/Fixed listings –  Three style of auctions are possible: Standard, Penny and Fixed price auctions. Your users can sell an item as a standard auction or list their item at a fixed price. You can also run a penny auction site.

4. Payment gateways – Plugin comes with PayPal and Authorize.net payment system. Stripe payment is also available as addon which can be bought as addition.

5. Internal invoicing – Buyer will automatically get invoice after auction finishes. The invoice includes all necessary data as well as the link for payment.

6. Internal email – Your users can email each other with our enhanced Internal Email system. All the features you need in an Internal Email System.

7. Favorite listings – Users can add any listing to their favorites in order to keep track of them. Users will be notified when favorite auction is about to expire.

8. Featured listings – There are many ways for users to make their auctions stand out. Those come as featured listings. They include options to use bold, include auction in sidebar, additional images, category featured, use of reserved price, etc. You decide what features will be enabled and charged for.

9. Sidebar featured – Users can also pay to have their auction listing appear on the sidebar of the site.

10. New/Active/Ending soon/Just ended/Draft auctions – There can be several areas on your auction site. Areas are self-explanatory.

Most Active means auctions that get the most views/bids. Ending soon auctions are shown based on an ending period that can be set in the admin area. The default is 5 days.

Just ended auctions will be auction listings that were sold or unsold. Users can save an auction as a draft so that they can come back later to edit it. A listing would have to be paid for before it becomes an active listing on your auction site.

11. Pending/Active status – If Free Mode is active, all auctions will be put into a pending state untill you confirm their activation.

12. Reserve price/Buy now – Users can add a Reserve Price or Buy Now feature to their listing if you have it enabled. You can charge for these style features as well.

13. Buyer/Seller feedback – Buyers and sellers can see all of their feedback. Users can see these before participating in auctions.

14. Member profiles – Users can view all users profiles. Profiles show username, avatar, location and feedback.

15. Prevent sniping – You can extend an auction’s end time, if someone bids within the last minutes.

16. Private Messages – Bidders and auction owners can exchange private messages.

 

WP Auction Plugin Admin Features

1. Multisite Compatible – Fully compatible with WordPress multisite setups

2. Fees – Turn some off or turn some on. It’s up to you whether you want to allow fees. Define how the fees work. Whether it’s based on a percentage or fixed price. You set the amount scale and the price.

3. Currency Settings – Pick the currency that appears on the site. Currently 13 currency are available. The default is the dollar.

4. Categories – You can create niche category structure and set the order of how the categories appear when people sell or search for items.

5. Fixed/Percentage Setup – You can charge a fixed price for users to list an auction or setup a percentage based on the price of the auction. 

6. Timezone – You are able to set timezone for auctions in order to avoid any manipulations.Be noted, once you set timezone, you can’t change it again.

7. File limits – You can set the max file size limit. This keeps the space on your server down to a minimum. Also set the number of photos a user can add to a Gallery. The default is 5.

8. User/Invoice/Auction/Accounting/Bid Management – Control your users from within the admin area. See what auctions they have, what bids they have as well as their feedback. If needed you have ability to delete and ban users. You can view all the invoices in the system. These invoices are what the sellers are sending to buyers.

Thanks to accounting management option you can see all the money that you’re making from auction listing fees. Search specific time frames to see what money you made during that time frame. You can see how many auctions are going on. How many users you have, how many invoices have been sent and their amounts.

9. Fraud Report – There is option for users to report auctions. If a user feels that an auction is suspicious, he can report it. You will receive email notification with reported auction. This feature can be turned off. 

10. Videos – Users can submit YouTube videos in their auctions. You can turn this On/Off.

11. Bid Increment Settings – Set how the bids increment for auctions.

12. Shipping – This option allows users to add other shipping options to their auction.

13. Relisting settings – You can allow users to relist their auctions. This feature can also be charged.

 

What Is So Special About WordPress Auction Software Plugin?

You install it like any other WordPress plugin. After activation you will get new tab named Auction SW in your site dashboard sidebar on the left where you can set up and configure how the plugin will function on your website.

Auction page will be automatically created in WordPress. You could also create one by and adding a shortcode [mam-auction] to insert the auction features, on new page.

 

auction-wordpress-plugin

 

If you want to make the auction page the homepage of your website then just change the default WordPress settings so that a static page is shown as the homepage.

The plugin also comes with 2 widgets which can be added to your site’s sidebar or other widgetized areas. These widgets are quick search widget and featured listings widget.

As already mentioned there are three possible auction styles of selling items. Those are traditional auction style of selling items (where interested parties can submit a bid until the closing date with the highest bidder wining the item), fixed price where visitors can either take it or leave it, without having the ability to bid on the price.

The third option is to run a penny auction, where bidders must pay a non-refundable fee to place a small incremental bid with the hope of winning the item for a greatly reduced price.

In order for users to start listing items for sale, or begin bidding and making purchases, they must first register an account. This whole process is integrated into your website with the account data stored in WordPress without the need to rely on a third-party service.

 

wp-auction-software-general-settings

 

After a visitor has registered they can then list their items for sale. When doing so, they can opt to pay an additional fee to list their auction as a featured item.

These featured auctions are listed on the homepage and displayed in order to catch the attention of visitors arriving at website.

Another option for making listings standout is option of making auction featured in the sidebar. This means auction listing will be constantly display as the visitors navigate around the site.

As the site owner you can decide whether to enable these featured listings and what fee to charge users for making use of them.

Key part of buying online is the trust factor. This WordPress auction plugin makes possible to contact those selling items. It adds an internal messaging system to your WordPress site.

Sellers and buyers can then contact each other. This allows them to ask pre-sale questions to help them decide whether they want to place a bid or not, and also finalize any other details after the auction has ended.

All the items listed for auction can be organized using the built-in features of WordPress, such as categories. Visitors to the site can browse the different auction categories and sub-categories to see what items are listed before deciding whether to make a bid or not.

These auction categories are separate from the standard WordPress post categories, helping you to keep the two types of content separate.

The plugin comes pre-populated with a huge number of listing categories and sub-categories to save you time when setting up your site. Alternatively, visitors can also use the search tool to find all the items they are looking for.

 

Payment Settings

WP Action Software supports payments through PayPal and Authorize.net. Users can fund their account before bidding, and this can be made a requirement. This WordPress auction software will auto-generate and email invoices to those who win an auction.

This makes life easier as you don’t have to worry about monitoring the auctions and manually contacting the winning bidder.

 

wp-auction-software-email-template

 

The plugin also contains other email templates which are delivered on certain actions, such as outbid, winner, loser, purchase, item sold notifications, etc.  There is separate tab to set fees for your WordPress auction site. And there is many possibilities here.

 

best-wordpress-auction-plugin-listing-fees

 

They range from activate fees, bold fees, buy now fee, home page featured, category featured, sidebar featured, top page featured, auction setup, picture gallery fees, relisting and reserve price.

 

WordPress Auction Plugin/Software Pricing

The WP Auction Software plugin will cost you $67 for single site and free support and free upgrades for one year. After year passes, you will have to renew license in order to be receive updates and support (you are not obligated to renew and can still continue to use after a year).

If you like to add Stripe payment gateway to WP Auction Software, you will need to purchase addon. It is priced (currently) $19.

 

Legal Things to Consider

Be careful when allowing others to sell through your site. Create an agreement that your users will sign or agree to before bidding or selling.

Also, create a page that discusses proper auction activities. You will have to decide who is responsible if your users get burned on a sale and how these issues will be handled. Do your research concerning legal issues in your area. Keep good standard business practices.

 

WP Auction Software Advantages

  • Invoices are automatically sent
  • Pre-populated listing categories
  • Many options for setting up fees
  • Ability to sell digital downloads
  • Anti fraud feature

 

WP Auction Software Disadvantages

  • Only 3 payment gateways (Stripe gateway is sold separately) and you can use only one at same time
  • Lack of documentation
  • Updates and support only for 1 year (to continue receiving support and updates you need to renew license)
  • No make an offer feature

 

WP Auction Plugin Summary

What if you could be in complete control of the site that hosts your auctions? You wouldn’t have to pay any commission, and you’d be in full control of the look and feel of the site.

You could even let other people add auctions to your site. Sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it? Well, you could have all this by simply setting up a WordPress site, and installing one simple, but awesome plugin.

The great thing about WordPress is that with a single plugin you can dramatically transform your website. Those that wish to create a simple auction site for an event or as a niche related replacement for eBay, then this plugin is perfect.

The WP Auction Software plugin certainly has all the features you need to turn WordPress into an auction website. The back-end admin user interface is clearly designed and well-presented making it fairly straightforward.

The front end registration and login forms make it easy for visitors to sign up and either start listing their own items for sale, or begin bidding on listed by others. Email notifications are automatically sent out to keep both buyers and sellers in the loop.

If you are looking to create an online auction website, or add this feature to an existing website, then the WP Auction Software plugin is a well-rounded choice that contains all the tools you need to do so.

WordPress is a great platform for any type of eCommerce. That even includes creating your very own auction site. Whether you want your own platform that you can sell from, build a platform that others can sell from, or both, this WordPress auction plugin is sure to meet your auction needs.

Another great plugin from same developer is WP SurveyFunnel plugin so be sure to check that if you also need survey feature.

And now to you! Have you ever thought about creating an auction website or have you already created one? Let me know in comments below.


DISCLOSURE: Posts may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through one of those links, I might get a small commission, without any extra cost to you. Read more about it here.

5 thoughts on “Create Your Own Auction Site Using WordPress Auction Plugin / Software”

  1. Hey, we have used the wordpress auction theme from sitemile.com
    its been great, its not a plugin sure, but its a more complete solution for our case

  2. Will the plugin allow me to eliminate the increasing increments? I want each bid to be the same amount. Is this possible?

    1. You will have to contact support through official page and ask about this option. It has been long time when I last used plugin and it had lots of updates from then.

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