Transition a Silent Auction Item to a Live Auction Item

In some cases, organizations may offer the live auction items as silent auction items and start accepting initial bids throughout the event, and then convert these silent auction items to live auction items and continue the live auction in their live stream, with the starting prices being set to the highest bid amount from the silent auction performed on these items in the previous period.

Converting a silent auction item to a live auction item is simple.  Let's step through an example.

Let's take the following item. This is supposed to be a live auction item that will be bid during the live stream. However, the organization created the item as a silent auction item, and enabled it for bids early in their auction life cycle, weeks before the live stream event.

Note the settings below for this item, where it is set to accept bids, the bid increments are set, and it is not setup for Buy-Now since we don't want anyone buying this just yet.

Once the bids start coming in, you will know the highest bid information.

Typically, a brief period of time before the live stream event, organizer would update this silent auction item to convert it to a live stream so that it's ready to go by the time the live event begins. This period allows the users to have a preview of the live auction items in the live auction list before bidding begins. This period could be 1 hour before the live event or a few minutes before the event… Allow yourself some time to convert these items to live items.

Let's look at an example silent auction item below as we update it to become a live auction item.

Steps:

1) Go to the manage auction page, and locate the silent auction item and the action button on the item

2) Click the Edit Item in the action menu

3) In the edit window that shows the item details, update the following fields as preferred.

a) Access Options: Depending on your preference, you could change the guest option to "view only" to put the live auction items on preview until the auctioneer starts the bidding process and update it to Allow Bids or purchase option when the auctioneer is ready to accept bids for the item.

     Note: If you'd rather not update statuses during the live auction, you can simply keep the Access options as "allow bids or purchase" when making this conversion and leave it as such until the end of the auction. This means you may get a bid from someone before the live auction begins, but they can't go any further as the auctioneer has to set the next bid amount anyway.

b) Switch the drop down in the purchase options area from "Silent Auction Item" to "Live Auction Item"

c) Update the Starting Bid to a value you prefer.  This should be a higher value than the current highest bid on the item.  In our example, current highest bid was $2000, so we are updating the starting bid to $2,100

d) Provide any planned bid increments if exists. Enter an amount and tab out or click anywhere to add a value to the list. These increments make the live auction go smoother as they provide default increment values that the auctioneer/assistant can click on to prepare the next bid as the bids are coming in.  The increments shown below only examples for this item, you can select your own increments that make sense for each item specifically.

4) Hit Save to commit your updates.  When the guests click the live auction icon on their guest page to view the items, this item will now appear in that list.

5) Repeat for each item.

Thank you for reading! Let's go do some good.