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Our First On-Line Auction...Lessons Learned...

by Eric C
(Chaska, Minnesota, USA)

I am a Business Administrator for a Church and Parochial School. We have done silent and live auctions for a number of years and this year decided to step it up a notch at our annual Spring Fling event and offer some items using an on-line auction and decided to use cMarket. I was impressed with how quick it was to set up everything on cMarket.

What is really neat about cMarket is the ability to allow others in your organization (and outside of your organization if you choose) to create auction items and post to your on-line auction. As the organizer, you have final say as to how the item lists, pricing, etc. You can also deny a submitted item and choose not to have it appear on your on-line auction.

We also chose a few cMarket consignment items from the cMarket Place. These are booster items that allow you to offer some additional items, like Hot Air Balloon Rides, vacations, sports memorabilia, etc. The nice thing about consignment items is that you only pay for them if you sell them. And you can almost always sell at a profit as they are offered to cMarket auction clients at pretty good prices, so that your organization profits the difference between the discounted price and the sale price at your auction.

The auction went well -- our only difficulty was that some of our patrons would have preferred some of the sports memorabilia displayed at a live event, as opposed to merely pictured on our website. We did some items as on-line only and some as both on-line and live event. Offering some items as online only offered those people who could not attend the live event to still feel like they were part of the excitement. It also gave us the opportunity to get people excited about the event and start bidding early and I think people enjoyed the chance to see (and research) some of the items that would be in our live-event live and silent auctions prior to the night of the event. Educated shoppers will generally bid more!

I can say that our event was a great success and the on-line auction really gave the event a bit more "panache" I would definitely recommend using a company like cMarket to try it out for your next big event!