Auction Watchlist & Alerts: Track Without Bidding

Bidders don’t want to bid early. Bidding early signals interest, drives the price up, and gives the seller leverage. The watchlist is the alternative: track the lot, decide late, jump in when the conditions are right — without pretending you will remember an end time that anti-sniping may move anyway.

What can be watched

Any lot you can open — scheduled, live, or already ended — has a Watch button on its detail page; Watching takes it off again. Watching needs a signed-in user with an email address on the account; without either, the platform says so plainly instead of silently dropping the request. The lot’s watch count is kept automatically, so the seller sees attention building without doing anything.

The watchlist page

/auction/watchlist lists your watched lots with status, current price, bid count and time left, who in your tenant added the lot and when, an optional note, and the two toggles that drive every alert: bid notifications and ending notifications. The header counts how many lots you watch and how many of them have notifications switched on. Search runs across the whole watchlist — lot, watcher, status, note, price, bid count or date — before the page is cut, and the footer lets you jump to any page or page size.

Two toggles, three moments

Bid notifications fire when somebody bids on a watched lot. Ending notifications fire twice: a 24-hour reminder (sent when the lot has between 23 and 25 hours left) and a 1-hour reminder (between 45 and 75 minutes left). A job runs every 15 minutes, finds the lots inside those windows, and stamps each lot once per reminder so nobody is pinged twice for the same hour. The message tells you which window you are in — a day left reads differently from an hour left.

Two alerts do not belong to the watchlist at all. When you are outbid, you are told because you were the high bidder, watching or not. When a new bid lands on your own lot, you are told because you are the seller. And when a scheduled lot goes live, the notification goes to the seller’s tenant — the watcher sees the status flip on the page and on the list.

Delivery

Alerts land in the in-app bell and follow your notification preferences for email. During a live auction most bidders keep the lot page open in another tab: it listens to Realtime and refreshes every 30 seconds as a fallback, so the number you react to is the number on the server.

Upcoming lots

/auction/upcoming lists scheduled lots that have not opened yet. A background job checks every 2 minutes and flips them live on their start time. Watch them from their detail page now, and the ending reminders take care of the rest. It’s not a calendar entry. It’s a row with a stamp.