Auction Formats and Lots: How a Lot Becomes a Live Auction

New sales use direct payment only after explicit agreement. The buyer pays the seller outside ReVend; both pay 0% ReVend transaction commission. The buyer reports payment and the seller separately confirms receipt. Administrators and finance record these declarations in the purchase or sales dossier, with optional reference and a reason for corrections. ReVend does not check a bank account. Existing escrow dossiers retain their current handling.

An auction lot is a sellable batch with auction-specific metadata: starting bid, optional reserve, optional buy-now price, duration, start time and visibility. The lot is what bidders bid on; the underlying assets are what the winner receives when the sale settles.

Choose open access or selected buyers

The seller chooses All signed-in buyers or Selected buyers while preparing the lot. Open access requires a signed-in user with a verified email, an active organization and Auction access. Selected buyers means private access for buyer organizations that accept an invitation. The choice is fixed after publication; possession of a private lot link alone does not grant access.

Once a private lot is scheduled or live, the seller creates an invitation for the email address of an administrator or manager at the buyer company. The seller copies the link and shares it directly; ReVend does not send an invitation email. A link is valid for seven days. The seller can see whether it is awaiting acceptance, accepted, expired or revoked, and can renew a link that has not been accepted. Renewal makes the previous link unusable.

Revoking access requires a reason. After an accepted invitation is revoked, that buyer organization loses access to the lot, photos and new bidding information. Existing bids, purchases and obligations remain. A previously issued invitation cannot undo revocation; the seller must explicitly issue a new link to readmit the buyer. Expiry of a link does not remove access already accepted.

If a private auction ends without a sale, it remains an unsold Auction record and is not automatically published on public Market. Open lots retain their existing no-sale relisting route.

The live format

English ascending auctions are the live engine: open bids, visible current price, highest valid bid wins when the timer closes. Anti-sniping extends the timer when a bid lands near the end, so a last-second steal does not rob the seller of actual price discovery.

Dutch Clock, Sealed Bid and Japanese Clock remain product concepts. They may appear in catalog language, but the creation flow and the bidding engine today are English ascending only. That distinction matters: a catalog flag is not the same thing as a settlement-safe auction machine. Ask any finance team that has met a “small exception.”

Increments, reserve and buy now

Platform auction rules define the allowed durations, the bid increment table, the anti-sniping window and the bidder risk policy. The seller picks a duration from the allowed list; the increment and anti-sniping settings are snapshotted onto the lot at publish. Reserve is the seller’s floor: if the highest bid does not meet it, the lot does not sell and enters the no-sale relist flow.

A lot may carry a buy-now price at or above its starting bid and reserve. An eligible buyer who accepts the published payment terms can buy while the lot is live and bidding has not reached that price. ReVend closes the auction, records the sale and opens the buyer’s purchase dossier.

Verified lots from sellable inventory

A seller cannot auction a pallet that does not exist. Lots are built from sellable inventory and respect the Market/Auction channel lock: publishing fails if another channel already owns an item. Save draft keeps the whole setup — starting bid, reserve, buy-now price, duration, start time and visibility — and reserves the items for Auction without showing them to bidders. Reopening the draft restores the form; the draft can then be published or edited, not just deleted.

The lot page shows photos of the devices in the lot. The seller chooses the cover used on browse cards, and buyers can open the gallery. Photos follow the same access rules as the lot: private photos and thumbnails require current access, including after an invitation is revoked.

Lot lifecycle

The seller explicitly accepts direct payment and the batch payment term before publication. An unset term is shown as prepayment. The published terms and version remain fixed. A new lot becomes scheduled or live; the settled result records sold, reserve not met or no bids. A sold direct-payment lot creates the sale and outbound order without escrow.

One lot, one page

/auction/[id] picks the right screen by itself: your own lot opens the seller view, somebody else’s opens the bidder view. The bid history differs on purpose — the seller reads the full history, a bidder sees only their own bids. Both pages listen to Realtime and refresh every 30 seconds as a fallback, so a dropped socket costs you half a minute, not the auction.

Demo tenants and real tenants never see each other’s lots. The separation is enforced in the database on both sides, so a trial environment full of stock photos cannot leak into a real buyer’s browse page, and a real lot never lands in a demo. Two worlds. One codebase. No cross-contamination.