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Auction Permissions: How to create an exclusive auction

With the new permissions feature, you can now restrict viewing, bidding/purchasing on all or specific auction items to specific ticket holders. An example would be if you wanted to offer some of your auction items exclusively to your sponsors before opening it up to the rest of your guests or the public.

Let's review how you can add restrictions to your auction below.

  • First, go to your Auction management page, and click Actions-> Edit Permissions.

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  • You will be taken to the Event Access Settings page, where you can configure the auction access restrictions and other access settings.

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  • Click the link to add a new rule:

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  • When you are adding or editing a rule, you will provide the following pieces of information:
    • Who can perform action: this is a list of all available tickets for your event. You can select one or more tickets where this rule will apply. You must select at least one ticket.
    • Type of restriction: for auction permissions, this drop-down will give two options: "Can View" or "Can Bid". Choose the option you want to create a restriction for in this rule.
    • Action to be performed on: this is a list of all of your auction items. The previous selections on the ticket holder and the action type will be applicable to the auction items you select in this list.  You are basically indicating which items you want to restrict in this rule.
  • After your configure your rule, it might help to validate it if you simply read it from left to right, starting with the word "Only". E.g. "Only Sponsor ticket holders can view live auction item 1".

Here is an example:

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  • Auction items are displayed in several places in BetterUnite, and your rules will be applied wherever they are displayed to the public pages.
    • Guest Page:  this is the page your guests use to view and bid on auction items after registering. When displaying the auction items to guests, we will first validate if the item has any "view" restrictions on it based on the rules you may have configured.  If there are any restrictions, then we will validate if the current user is in any of the ticket holders given view rights to the item. If the guest is not in the list of allowed ticket holders, the item will not be displayed.
  • Example: In the above configuration, we can see that the Sponsor ticket holder ("Sponsor Smith" below) can view the Live Auction items 1 & 2, whereas the regular ticket holder ("Regular Blair" below) does not even get a live auction option nor can view these restricted items:

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  • Public Auction Page: this is the page that is linked to your event landing page. The public-facing auction page displays your auction items, with an option to register to bid. If there are any view restrictions on an auction item, this item will no longer be displayed in the public page because we don't know who the visiting user is.

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  • In the example above, you can see that the live auction items 1 & 2 are not displayed because there is a restriction on these items to only show them to Sponsor ticket holders. Since a public user doesn't have this information for us, they won't see these items until they visit their guest page and if they are a sponsor ticket holder.

Bid Restrictions

  • To restrict the viewing of certain information or examples, you can also restrict bidding on auction items. If you only restrict bidding, the items will still be visible to the public and to all ticket holders, unless another rule limits this visibility.
  • When a guest who is not on the allowed list tries to bid, they will receive a message stating that their registration does not currently permit bidding.

Need Additional Help?

We're here to assist you in any way we can. Don't hesitate to reach out to support@betterunite.com

Let's go do some good.