Greetings readers! In this beautiful article we will talk about how to launch an auction website using WordPress. We will first discuss what an auction website is, and how we can use WordPress to achieve the functionality we want.
What is an auction website?
First we have to discuss, what is an auction website ? So to keep it short, an auction website is a website that has items for auction. That means the buyers of that item will place their bids in order to obtain the product, and whoever has the highest price in the end, wins the product and gets to buy it for their bid.
Of course, when it comes to online auction websites there are other things involved too, like registration pages for sellers, posting the actual items, shipping, commission fees, payment gateways, bidding rules, and others. We will try to go in detail about each one.
What do I need to build an online auction website ?
The first two things you will need at first, is your hosting space, and a domain name. Normally you would want at least a VPS server when it comes to auction websites as they can be more demanding than a blog website. You would expect multiple concurrent users on the website all the time.
Using WordPress to launch your online auction website ?
As you know, WordPress is a blogging CMS that is open source. Also is the most popular cms on the whole internet, and powers over 30% of the websites in the entire world. In the past 10 years the themes and plugins spaces has evolved massively, and you could find a theme or a plugin for pretty much everything these days.
When using WordPress to create any type of website, you have two possibilities: either get a wordpress theme that does the function you need, or use a generic theme and some plugins to aid that. The issue when using multiple plugins is that you are dependant of many external sources, but we will detail more about that later.
1. Using a wordpress theme for my auction site
The advantage of using a theme to create your auction website, is that all functions are inside that theme, or they should be. And you will not be dependant of many vendors opposed to the case where you use multiple plugins from different vendors.
We can use specifically, an auction theme for this. I present you the wordpress auction theme from sitemile.com . They are doing a great job building and maintaining this theme, and the amount of features is absolutely awesome.
The most important features of the wordpress auction theme are:
- Allow users to post their own items, very much like eBay. Launch a multi seller marketplace
- Allow users to bid for items, max bidding feature.
- Anti snipping feature, to prevent users bidding on the last minute.
- Themed login and register pages. Your users will never know that you are using wordpress.
- Seller and Buyer dashboards – users have their own dashboards inside the app/website.
- Private Messages – sellers and buyers are able to exchange private messaging
- Several payment gateways – supports PayPal, Stripe, Authorize, Payfast, 2checkout, Voguepay and others.
- Make an offer feature – users are able to make an offer to a product for the seller to accept or reject.
> Find out more about the WordPress Auction Theme <
How much does it cost ?
As you see the prices start from $149 US, and can go even to 6 grand for the version where you can have a native mobile phone app as well. The theme maker recommends the 299$ package as that contains all features to get started in the website version, and thats all you need for a starter website. And for finding out more about other wp auction themes.
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