B&L Auction

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Posted By: leon

A little aftermath of the auction with some learning experiences. These are in no particular order......

1. There is about a 5-10 second lag time in the auction close and the s/w. I think it has to do with refresh rates and there is literally nothing that can be done about it (within this s/w). Someone was high bidder at 9pm and was the only bidder. At 9pm and 6 seconds another bid was placed. This is a s/w issue we didn't know about but do now. We apologize for the inconvenience. That will be something we make known going forward and we are very sorry it happened (and) without us knowing about it.
2. We need to figure out the issue with the max bids not being able to be left. There were about a half a dozen folks with this same issue. I am not sure if it was a button that wasn't being pressed, or what, but we will find out and let folks know.
3. This auction s/w didn't reset after each bid as I thought it would after initial bidding was over. It reset every 15 minutes if there was a bid placed in that previous 15 minutes. We just didn't know that is the way it works. Now we do. The auction ended at 12:30 am which wasn't too bad though an hour earlier might be better.
4. Neither Scott nor myself could place bids for anyone. Same thing with seeing "up to" bids...which is what we want. One bidder asked for me to help and I emailed our s/w provider and he did an up to bid for someone. Scott or I will NEVER be able to see up to bids (on purpose). We have a very "honest" s/w in that respect. Maybe "honest" to a fault though...meaning we need to be able to help bidders when they need it.
5. Our next auction will be 1 week shorter. We don't see the need to have a week of dead space in the auction...and that is basically what that 2nd week was.
6. We found out after the auction was already being put into place that we couldn't close lots individually. If our auction gets to where we hope it does (much larger)we will have to re-evalute our s/w needs....It is not our plan to have all night auctions....
7. We have had a few small issues with unexpected downtime that need to be addressed. Nothing critical but it's slightly disturbing.

Overall we think it went very well, especially for a first auction. As I/we think of more I will edit this post and add to it....but for the moment that's what I can think of..... We have already had many nice emails pointing out our lower fees too.....I guess people do notice....Thanks again to everyone who participated and the general interest shown. Scott and I really appreciate it.


edited one word out to not have incomplete sentence.