How to Create an Auction Website: Where to Start

Editor’s note: Having grown by more than 15% in 2020, online auctions keep being one of the biggest parts of the ecommerce market. For those businesses starting an auction website now, we offer a launch plan outlined in the article and ecommerce development services to bring it to life.

Online auctions owe their popularity to a very specific buying-selling process based on a bidding system. As a win-win benefit, businesses open up new sales opportunities while buyers enjoy favorable purchasing conditions.

Lay the groundwork for an auction website

In case you want to create your own auction website, here are a few things to plan.

Decide on the product domain. Broadly speaking, you may target a wider audience with mixed product assortment or meet niche demands by keeping within a particular product line. The product focus is going to affect website design, but it’s not rigid. Keep your ecommerce solution scalable to expand your product line in quantity and diversity as your business matures.

Prepare content. The latest trend in content marketing is to use AI to create as many versions of content pieces (like product descriptions, banners or ads) as you need to test and choose those that contribute to higher customer engagement and better conversions.

Engage ecommerce consultants. While ecommerce developers assume full ownership over the website development process, ecommerce consultants will help you plan and calculate a market entry strategy, choose the best-suited ecommerce technologies, and plan end-to-end customer experience.

Think of fancy brand and domain names. Basically, you can take two ways here: either choose a short and easy-to-remember name (like eBay) or create the one to reflect your brand specificity (like ShopGoodwill – a non-profit company that funds life-changing programs and services for people with disabilities and other barriers).

Choose an ecommerce platform. There are many platforms with vast ecommerce capabilities that can be customized to create auction marketplaces. Adobe Commerce (Magento) and Shopify are among the popular ones and will make for a good choice for mid-sized and enterprise businesses. We recommend choosing cloud hosting as business teams increasingly need to work remotely nowadays and don’t want to have business data scattered across different locations. Smaller retailers may not even need to build their own online presence and better go to create a web store on established and reputed auction marketplaces.

Design a website. May sound as a quick step, but the process actually includes research-based UX design, prototyping and UI design, ecommerce platform configuration and customization, cross-system integration, setting security measures, and testing.

Ready to start your auction website now?

In order to create an auction website, one needs to be well-versed in different platforms available on the market to be able to choose a suitable one, understand the functional specifics of online bidding, and have profound skills in web design and development. If you are looking for a company to assist you on the way, feel free to contact ScienceSoft’s team.