Your Guide on Building an Auction Site with WordPress

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Going once. Going twice. Sold! We are so familiar of scenes of men selling and auctioning their possessions. They want to sell their junk for the highest possible amount that they could get, thus the resort to bidding. It has been inevitable for the auction system to take bidding in the online world. Anyone who wants to build an auction site will be able to do so if they have a WordPress account and the right auction plugin to use.

Nowadays, eBay is a dominantly raising the bar for auction platform. Therefore, you will need a reason why you should create your own auction site on WordPress when you already have a ready-built website like eBay that you could use. If you have this kind of mentality, imagine everyone having the same line of thinking. Since everyone resorts to using eBay for their auctions, chances are, eBay will just provide you with a lot of varied and different auctions. This simply means that there is no certain and clear organization, as well as a society that revolves exclusively around the things that you auction.

If you want to build an auction site, then it is also important to establish your community. This will give you the maximum potential of attracting the right people that will more likely buy and take your products. It will be a give-and-take process for both you and your future customers. You will give them a place where they think they would belong and feel free to voice out their opinion and ideas, and at the same time, their community will give you a good statistics of having a lot of potential buyers. They will surely be interested to purchase your products.

Another important reason why you should not just settle with using eBay for your auction is that four letter word that will make anyone’s head ache. Fees. Nowadays, the fees on eBay are neck-high! As a website that thinks about gaining profits, of course eBay will always get a slice of the pie. EBay sees to it that they will get a portion of every sale made through their website.

This is why other people would rather pay for a hosting website that will let them build their own website. If you resort to having your own auction site, you will have the exclusivity that you will need. You will be the one making the calls. You will have the freedom to post everything that you are trying to auction, without letting your visitors visit another link that will redirect them to your account or page.

Plugins for your Auction Site

Although there are themes that are made specifically for auction websites, you can choose to use plugins in case you want to keep your original theme for your new auction website in WordPress.  These plugins will either allow your users to post items that are for sale on your website, or allow you to restrict them from doing so, resulting to a website that only showcases your products and services to be auctioned.

In order to determine if the plugin is efficient, it must have all the following features:

• It should allow users to register accounts that will allow them to bid.
• It should provide an organized gallery that will illustrate the items to be auctioned, as well as enough space for its detailed descriptions,
• It should allow the users to use keywords in searching for an item. This will help them save time by searching the specific product or service that they will purchase.
• It should give your users a lot of options like ‘Buy it Now’ or ‘Save to Cart’
• The system should regularly send email notifications.
• The system should allow private messaging. This will be very useful since you will be dealing with individual people who will be very aware of their buying rights.
• It should provide a clear mode of payment.
• It should allow your users and customers to post their comments and reviews – either for the service of the product itself.

Here are a few example of plugins that might come in handy for your Auction Website in WordPress

Ultimate WordPress Auction Plugin

This is considered to be the most popular auction WordPress plugin. This will allow you to post all of your items for sale. Pretty much like what you could do in eBay. Users will be allowed to create an account. With this account, they will be allowed to purchase or bid for items that are on auction, as well as post items that they would like to auction too. However, you have to purchase the full version of the plugin in order to allow your users to post.

Dutch Auction Masters

Even though this is a free plugin, it is still packed with great features when it comes to adding your own auctions to your website. Adding an auction is as easy like making a new post. You simply use the same tools except that there are some certain specification of features that are specially created for auction. In addition, setting up this plugin is quick and easy.

It has a similar feature as eBay wherein you hover a mouse over an image and that portion will show a pop up box containing a zoomed in image.

On the other hand, it also has a Paid version which offers more features like allowing the user to support multiple pages, customizing properties, payment options, as well as shipping options.

WooCommerce Simple Auctions

This is considered to be one of the most popular WordPress plugins that is specifically created for auction websites. One of its famous features is that it allows the user to set the start and end time for every auction he or she has.

Now that you have all the necessary basic knowledge that you need to know in making an auction website via WordPress, do not hesitate to explore and improvise on your own. However, there are also other conditions and situations that you need to be careful with in handling an auction site. Always remember to create an agreement that will serve as your proof that both you and your users have agreed to some terms, before you settle with the bidding or selling. You will never know when this might come in handy.