My humble little wordpress plugin was recently at the center of a very cool surf art auction that took place on First Coast Surf Rider.
The site had it's auction set up on this post {everything is sold out now} and they had some really cool paintings up for auction. I had the chance to look at them while the auctions were taking place. Some of the stuff probably did accrue more bids in person as there was also a live hosted event at a local restaurant, after the auctions closed on the site. I did see some of the prices for a few paintings go above $50 though on the site, from a starting bid of $10 or so. The first set of bids on the site probably helped push the final winning bid prices up.
It's still a cool thing to see that the plugin actually helped someone auction off real world items completely fee free. That too not just to local people, but to anyone from anywhere around the world. Naturally shipping is never free, unless I build my own Fedex or something 
If you haven't downloaded this plugin yet, I suggest you do. The traffic to our live page is increasing on a daily basis and I consistently see hits coming to my blog from there.
I would also like to thank Easy WordPress, Blog Perfume among many other blogs for featuring the plugin.
Some more exciting developments coming up around the plugin. So stay tuned.
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Sunday Stuff - Sept 30th 2007
Thank you!!!
I found the plugin at the perfect time. We knew we wanted to do the art auction and with a recent web design were finally plugin-ready. A quick Google search and WP Auctions was the only plugin that could do what we needed online.
Everyone loved the concept and it DEFINITELY helped drive the bids higher for the final in-person auction. The $50 pieces eventually jumped to $210 and $185, so the online bids gave a hefty lift.
Based on our member’s comments here’s some feedback:
- Half a dozen bidders complained that when they entered their info to bid they got an error message that said “bidder email not supplied” even though they had given it.
- I had one or two bidders that couldn’t access it at all because of company firewalls, but not sure if there’s a way around it.
- Everyone would have liked to see all auctions at one time. Instead, to see everything, they needed to click around each of the four icons in the lower right corner, which gave random displays. Is it possible to make this a sliding area or order it so that if a bidder clicks on one piece they get an arrow that lets them keep moving through everything?
- Along the same lines, as a webmaster I wish I could have created a unique embed for each auction. Instead, I could only embed the one which gave a random auction each time refreshed.
- Lastly, a lot of bidders had a hard time understanding that there was more than one auction, so I kept having to tell people to click “more” to get the four random selections in the bottom right.
I know we used the plugin for a process that was a little bigger than the original intent, but it did a fine job and we’d love to use it again in the future. I’m going to write a follow-up piece on “How to Run a Non-Profit Silent Auction” and will submit to the various social networks with links to the plugin. Hopefully you see some nice traffic from it!
Thank you again, it was an awesome event and WP Auctions helped make it happen!!!
Thanks for all the feedback First Coast Surfrider.
It’s stuff like what you said above which will help make this plugin more powerful with time.
I’m glad it helped you out.
We’ll definitely keep your suggestions at the top of our list.