Live Internet Bidding
This is not Ebay, which is a form of timed bid by tender. Public auctions operate realtime, with a human auctioneer co-ordinating multiple bid platforms, such as other live internet bidding platforms, room bidding, phone bidding and commission bidding.
The hammer has no time limit and only falls when the competing bidders stop increasing the price.
It is complex and is dependent upon human interaction from the auctioneer, the auctioneer’s clerk and the bidders themselves, all of whom can be in multiple locations.
By having an in-house, independent, transparent solution we also enhanced our offering to the legal profession when dealing with probates.
The scope of work was again complex. Development fell in two distinct areas; firstly straight software development of user interfaces and integration into the back end business software and secondly both software and hardware implementation to create a live video stream.
The software specification required three distinct interfaces:
The Auctioneer
This sat with the auctioneer on the rostrum and enabled the auctioneer to visually see the current hammer price and intelligently know which of the logged in bidders were interested in bidding. The auctioneer could choose to talk directly to the potential bidders via the live broadcast video feed.
The Clerk
This was the auctioneers online eyes and ears, permitting bids, inputting non platform bids and most importantly keeping up with the auctioneer's increments.
The Bidder
The interface used by bidders to make bids and follow the auction. All bidders required complex registration being a financial commitment to buy and also secure authentication.
The specification for realtime video broadcast was far wider. Software development revolved around the bidder UI and video codecs. Complications came with hardware, connections to a local network and the capacity of the internet connection.
The project was made more challenging with the change of senior developer midway. In the end, this worked out better with the new senior software developer being the best I have ever worked with.
The system was built using javascript, using server side Node.js. The application worked directly via a standard browser. The technology around realtime data transfer was web sockets which are a very well established piece of technology. Using this technology mix allowed a wide community of developers to work on the project if required and made the final product bulletproof.
During specification we had a miscommunication around control of the increments. The initial development team could only reference Ebay and believed that price increases were automatic and to be made by the system. What very quickly became obvious was that the auctioneer, via the clerk, required control of increments as they could originate from outside the system such as in room bidding.
By the time I had moved on to pastures new the live bidding system had processed millions in transactions, added thousands to buyer registrations and enabled lucrative new business sales.
It was a fantastic project to get over the line.