Penny Auctions

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Introduction

If you have visited sites like swoopo.com or madbid.com you know what this is about. Customers buy a number of bids from you. Each bid raises the price of an item by a very low amount, for example a penny. When someone places a bid on the item a timer starts to count down. If the timer reaches zero the last bidding customer wins the item and can buy it for the final price, which usually still is very low.

 

This concept combines auctions with a kind of lottery. While the merchant selling the items is not very well paid for the items themselves, the sales of bids will make it up and even give a large profit in most cases. This does require that there are a lot of bidders though. With few visitors to your site you will be basically giving away your items. This is not necessarily a bad thing since those first, extremely cheap items you sell will make the word go around that people can make a real bargain by buying from you, which in turn will increase the number of visitors and the profit from bids.

 

AShop is the first shopping cart to introduce this kind of feature, which gives it some unique advantages: you can sell both penny auction items and regularly priced items on the same site, you can use your penny auctions to promote your regularly priced products by just running auctions at a certain time, you can sell items as penny auctions and then sell services related to the items at a regular fixed price.

 

Bid Code Fulfilment Option

To start using this feature you will first need to provide a way for your customers to buy bids. This is done through the new fulfilment option: Bid code.

 

1.Open the page Configuration->Fulfilment in your admin panel.
2.Choose Bid code in the box "Select Fulfilment Method" and click Add.
3.Change the name of your new fulfilment option or accept the default by clicking Update.

 

Now you need to add at least one product that uses the Bid code fulfilment option.

 

1.Open the page Edit Catalog.
2.Select the category you wish to put the bid codes product in.
3.Click New product and fill out the forms.
4.When the new product has been added click the Attributes button.
5.Add an attribute with 1 alternative. Call it "Bids".
6.Enter the number of bids you want to sell, for example: 30, into the box labeled "1:" and click Save to store the new attribute.
7.Click the button Fulfilment for the new product.
8.Select your bid codes option in the box: "Select Option".
9.Enter "bids" in the "Bids" fieldname box and click Submit.

 

You have now added a product that will automatically generate a bid code that provides a certain number of bids, for example 30 codes, and send it to your customer when this product is bought. The customer will also receive instructions about how to use the code. It should be entered into the page bidregister.php in your AShop along with a nick name that is used to identify the currently active bidder for a product.

 

Add an Auction

To add an auction that your customers can bid on you will simply add a new product to any of your categories but select Floating price instead of entering a regular fixed price.

 

1. Add or edit a product in your catalog.

2. Click the button Floating price.

3. Enter the least amount the item should be sold for (usually 0.00 on this type of auction) into the box Startprice.

4. Enter the amount with which the price should be incremented when a customer places a bid on this item, in the box Bid increment.

5. Enter the number of seconds the timer should count down before the auction is won by the last bidder, in the box Length.

6. Using the form fields labeled Activate, select a date and time when this auction should go live. After that time the count down timer will start as soon as the first bid is placed. Before that time the item can not be bought.

 

When you have saved your product it will now be available in your catalog as an auction and only the person who places the winning bid will be able to buy it from you. He/she can still select not to buy it though. When the item is bought by the winner it is automatically deactivated in your catalog. If you reactivate it, it will be possible to buy it once again by placing bids.