Help

Yes, and we would rather you did. Building the whole auction costs nothing: add every lot, print the codes, put the screen on a projector, and run a full rehearsal with a colleague bidding against you from their phone. You only pay once you are happy with what you have built and want to use it for real. Tick “this is a rehearsal” and every screen says so, and no winner e-mails go out.

No. A school, a sports club, a company, a wedding, a village hall. The tool does not care what the money is for. Most of our evenings are fundraisers simply because that is who holds auctions.

For a typical evening of twelve to twenty lots, about an hour — and most of that is typing in the lots. Printing the codes and setting the screen up is a few minutes. Start a week ahead rather than the afternoon of, mostly so you have time to run a rehearsal.

There is no hard limit, and the price steps up with the number of lots. In practice a live evening works best with ten to twenty lots and a silent auction alongside it for the smaller things — an audience has about ninety minutes of attention, and forty lots spread thinner is the most common reason an evening raises less than it should.

Yes. Invite the rest of your committee and you all see the same auction. On the night, one person can run the auctioneer’s screen while another takes bids from someone with a flat battery.

The site is in English today and more languages are on the way. Ask us if you need a specific one for your evening — the screen your guests see matters more than the site, and we would rather hear about it before your night than after.

They point their phone camera at the printed code beside the lot, type a name and an e-mail address once, click once in the e-mail to confirm, and they can bid on everything that evening. No account, no password, no app to install. That single confirmation click is also what keeps joke bids out.

Bidding happens on people’s own phones over mobile data, so the hall’s wifi only matters for the one laptop driving the screen. Bring a phone as a hotspot for that laptop and you are covered. If the connection drops for a moment, nothing is lost — the bids are already in.

Yes. You enter it from your own screen and it counts like any other bid — the room sees it come in on the big screen exactly as if they had tapped it themselves.

The current lot, the current bid, who is leading, the bids ticking in, and a countdown that takes over the screen at the end. Before you start, the same screen shows your logo and the story behind what you are raising money for. There is no menu of ours anywhere on it.

No. A bid in the last seconds extends the lot, so the highest bid wins rather than the quickest finger. It matters more than it sounds: people who feel cheated do not come back next year.

Over a few days, with everything open at once and each lot closing on its own time — a silent auction. Or one evening, lot by lot, with a countdown per lot. Or one evening, lot by lot, where every new bid restarts a short count and you drop the hammer when the room goes quiet, which is closest to a traditional auctioneer.

Yes, and it is one of the things that makes the biggest difference. Share the link and they bid from home on the same lots at the same moment. Put a phone on a tripod, start a live broadcast on YouTube or Vimeo, paste the link, and the video appears on your auction page — so they hear the auctioneer while they bid. Grandparents, members abroad, the family that could not get a babysitter.

Yes. They set a maximum and the tool bids for them, one step at a time, never more than it has to. People who do not have to watch all evening tend to bid higher.

Yes. Void that bid and the one below becomes the highest again. Hammered a lot too early? Put it back on the block. Neither is hidden from you and neither breaks anything.

No. The screen shows something like “Sarah from Springfield”, never someone’s full name in front of a room. You see the full details on your own screen.

One payment for one auction, starting at €49, and the price follows the number of lots you actually have when you pay. If you run several evenings a year there are yearly plans that work out cheaper. Everything is on the pricing page, and nothing is charged until you open the real bidding.

You can choose one, but you do not have to. Most people pay once for one evening. Clubs that run several a year take a yearly plan — Pro covers twelve auctions, Studio fifty. Nothing renews by itself, not even a yearly plan, so there is no cancellation to remember.

No, none. Winners pay you directly through your own payment link. We never hold your money and we take no share of it. That is the whole point — a percentage on a charity evening comes out of the cause.

They get an e-mail with what they owe and your own payment link, sent the moment the hammer falls. Most people pay before they have left the building. You also get one printable sheet per buyer for the door, for anyone who would rather settle in cash.

Yes, ten percent on top of the hammer price if you want one. Bidders see it before they bid, and it is broken out separately on their invoice. Nobody likes discovering a surcharge afterwards.

Yes, a hidden reserve per lot. A lot that stays below it simply does not sell, so nothing goes for four euros because the room was distracted at the wrong moment.

If your auction never opened for real bidding, write to us and we refund what you paid. If it did run, we cannot — the work it was bought for has been done. Halls fall through and storms happen; we would rather sort it out than argue about it.

Yes, by e-mail the moment the payment goes through. Prices include VAT where VAT applies, and the invoice shows everything a treasurer needs for the books.

It runs from the moment you open the bidding until a week after your last lot closes. That week of slack is deliberate: late payments, a lot that needs reopening, a settlement sheet you forgot to print. After that the results, the buyers and the invoices stay readable forever, but the bidding cannot be reopened.

A results page with every lot, what it sold for and to whom, the total raised, and what is still unpaid. You can export the whole thing, and print a settlement sheet per buyer for the door.

They are yours. We hold them for you and do nothing else with them — no marketing, never passed to anyone. You can wipe the whole list in one click once everything is settled, and we delete an auction and everything in it twenty-four months after it closes unless you ask us to keep it longer.

You copy a previous auction, lots and all, on the Pro and Studio plans — which is most of the reason those plans exist. Otherwise you set up a new one, and a new evening means a new auction.

Auction Tool is a trading name of Online Galerij B.V., a Dutch company in Voorburg, registered with the Chamber of Commerce under number 74764225 in The Hague. The same people run OnlineGallery.art. The full details, including the VAT number and IBAN, are on the contact page.

We build this to work on the night and we test it. If the tool fails and your auction cannot run because of it, we refund what you paid for that auction. If your evening is this week, say so in the subject line of your e-mail and it goes to the top of the pile.

No. We are not part of your sale at all. When someone wins a lot, the agreement is between that person and you — we do not own the lots, do not hold the money, do not deliver anything, and are not the auctioneer.

Anything you are not allowed to sell: weapons, medicines, live animals, anything stolen. And the less obvious one — a signed shirt is fine, a “meet the player” the player has not agreed to is not. In some countries a public charity auction or raffle needs a permit, and checking that is on you.

Write to info@auctiontool.ai. A person reads it and answers, usually the same day. There is no ticket system and no queue.