Creating websites has become easy nowadays, thanks to Wordpress, you no longer need to sit for hours, days, weeks and months cooking several HTML, CSS and other codes together to get a unique website. With the help of WordPress, your Auction website can be created within hours.

Website creation has become easy nowadays. Thanks to WordPress, you no longer need to spend months preparing an HTML, CSS and any other codes together to get a unique website. With the help of WordPress, your auction website can now be created within hours.

In this article, we would take you through how to build your auction site like eBay using WordPress and profit from it. We will also share tips on:

Setting up the Website

The most important of all tasks is the setting up of your website, it can be considered as the foundation of your auction website. Without it having the right balance and setup, only little could be achieved. It is very important that you are using the right platform for setting the website foundation.

WordPress development company has two related yet different WordPress software which might confuse a beginner easily. WordPress.com is one of the hosting platforms available, while WordPress.org is a self-hosted WordPress.

It is advisable for a beginner to use WordPress.org which is the self-hosted one as it offers them more features directly from WordPress plugin development company.

Not all wordpress web development companies can be considered to develop your e-commerce platform since the software development is targeted directly at the e-commerce website called WooCommerce.

A domain name can cost as much as $14.99 for a year and hosting costs $7.99/month, while SSL certificate costs US$69.99/year. For a person with a low budget, this might be very expensive. Bluehost hosting company might be a better option for you as they are officially recommended by WordPress development company and they offer discounts.

Choosing WordPress Plugin for Auctions

WordPress plugin development company has a lot of plugins for achieving this purpose. But, we would be making use of Yith Woocommerce Auction plugin for this purpose. You need to at first search for this plugin, install and activate it. You can do that by following this tutorial here.

YITH WooCommerce auction is a paid plug. For a single site license, you might need to pay between 60 to 81 Euros. After the payment, you will be opened to download the plugin and get its necessary documents and a year’s support and updates.

After activating the YITH WooCommerce Auction Plugin, you will need to visit the plugin and click on license activation block to activate it by entering its license key. (This information is under your account on the plugin’s website)

It comes with a default setting that you can use without altering it, but if you like, you can review some of them and adjust to suit you. You can configure or adjust the settings by going to >YITH Plugin >> Auction.

Here you can set the following:

Adding an Auction Item

Thanks to the built-in WooCommerce products, it will be very easy for you to add items for auction using YITH WooCommerce auctions.

This can be done simply by adding the item to be auctioned as a new WooCommerce product using the following step:
>Go to Products >Click on Add New Page.

Following this step, the details of the items to be auctioned will be recorded after which the title has to be filled along with few pictures of the product and other important details.

The auction setting can be implemented by selecting the option ‘Auction’ which is next to the product option. And from there the starting auction price, bid up, the minimum increment amount, the reserve price and the buy now function can be set.

The date and time the auction will go live must also be set and at times grace period must be added after the original auction date expires.

With this in place, publishing your auction is the next important thing to be done and it will be immediately available in the WooCommerce shop page and they will be highlighted with an icon for easy identification as an auction item.

Managing your Auctions

The beauty of an auction website is that you can add items for auction at any given time, and they are live on your website immediately, or until the time you scheduled them to go live.

So, in case you decide to go offline for few hours and want the auction to start after you are gone, you can set the time you want the auction to start at, and whenever the auction starts, registered users can start bidding even in your absence.

WordPress plugin development company has made the plugin in such a way that the timer will be shown next to the item to be sold, and the current bid or the highest bid can visibly be seen and they too can add their bid.

The previous bid will be displayed with a partially encrypted username. And you can remove any bid at any time, or edit the details of the product to be auctioned.

At the end of the auction, the highest bidder will have his price automatically and get the item bided for. An auction can come to its end before the time ends if a bidder decides to offer the buy now price stated by you, and the product will automatically add to their cart.

All information about the latest bid, grace time and auction end time will be sent via email notification to anyone participating in the bidding. The final winner will receive notification of being eligible to pay for the item.

Allow Other Users to Add Auction Items

You can also allow other users to add their own product for auctioning. The problem though is that YITH WooCommerce auction plugin will not allow users to add their own auction products.WooCommerce assumes that you are the only one selling and as such only you can add products.

After setting your website as an online marketplace, other users who are interested can now apply and become a seller on your website. Their items will need your authorization before appearing on the front page of your website for auctioning.

At the end of the bidding and a winner has been announced, you then stand to get your commission from their sales.

Mastering WordPress to Promote your Auction Site

WordPress is definitely the best website builder in the world. Using and understanding their features is very easy and you can easily customize their features to suit whatever you want without much stress.

You can search online for the list of best WooCommerce themes, WooCommerce plugin and plugins for WordPress that is a must have and the best way to improve your speed and performance while using WordPress.

Conclusion

Building an auction website like eBay using WordPress is very easy. Thanks to the easy-to-use function of WordPress and thousands of tutorials that can be followed to understand this better. WordPress development services have also provided the best and the needed plugin to help you run your e-commerce the best way.

Following the guidelines stated in this article will help you set up a good auctioning website and start making your sales as soon as possible. Try as much as possible to familiarize yourself with the bidding settings and make sure you reach your final decision about the pricing and other related settings before pushing your product to the front page or the main shop.

Always update and add more features that will entice your users, give your users discounted products at times and create a good interaction with them. Make more profit by opening your website to everyone so they too can auction their items. All this in place, your website is a success.

Being a 360 degree software service company, we are experienced with the most complex web designs. We have a team of dedicated wordpress developers which would guide you from the very first step till the last. You may contact us for economic and custom wordpress development services for your business site.