Spearheading a business can often seem like an absolutely appealing option. It gives you the creative freedom while executing your work and you are free from all restrictions while making decisions. Further, it also allows you to be the boss of your own time.
But then there’s a glitch. Starting a business can often mean a considerable investment in terms of capital and this factor alone often leads to people shying away from the startup idea. If you happen to be one these people you should read on. By the end of this article, you should able to jump start your entrepreneurial ambitions with the Ultimate Auction Pro plugin and very little initial capital investment.
What is the Ultimate Auction Pro Plugin?
Have you heard of eBay? I am sure you have! It is one of the most popular auction websites in the World. Yes, you heard it right! In the world. The Ultimate Auction Pro plugin is going to help you develop a similar website, but on a smaller scale to begin with.
What’s in it for you?
Now that you know what the Ultimate Auction Pro Plugin does the next obvious question is how will you be able to make money with this website. Here are my tidbits in response to this question.
1. You can Auction Products on the Website
The most obvious thing that you can do with the Ultimate Auction Pro Plugin is to sell products in an auction environment. This way you can host an auction for products without having to go through the hassle of setting up a traditional auction. Also, online auctions help you increase your bidder reach while drastically reducing the auction hosting costs after initial website setup.
A product can be auctioned using the add auction option provided by the plugin. An auction can be easily be set up by providing details such as the product title, description, product images, payment method etc.
A product can be auctioned using either the simple bidding process or the proxy bidding process thereby allowing you the flexibility to choose a bidding engine based on your requirement. While the simple bidding method is available in the Ultimate Auction Pro plugin the proxy bidding method can be incorporated with the help of the proxy bidding add-on.
2. You can Earn Through Third Party Listings
Apart from earning through the products you auction, you can also earn through third party auction listings posted on your website. This holds true for third party products i.e. products which are auctioned by people other than yourself.
How does this work?
The Ultimate Auction Pro plugin provides an option to give various users the access to create an auction for their product on your website using the manage users option on the settings page at the back end.
Based on this a third party can log in to your system and post an auction listing for a product. The user will be charged for every new auction listing as per on the pricing model that you have created for posting a product auction listing on your auction website.
3. You can Earn Through Commissions
An external auctioneer can also be charged a certain commission amount when one of his product auctioned on your website is sold and the purchase process has been completed.
The Ultimate Auction Pro plugin provides an option to charge a commission to users posting auctions on your website using options in the settings page at the back end.
How will Your Customers Use It?
- Step 1: Customer will have to register or login to your website.
- Step 2: Customer can place bid for the product based on the current bid price and least incremental value.
- Step 3: Customer will be notified if a higher bid for the same product has been placed by any other customer. At this point of time, the first customer can revise the bid amount. This will continue until the time the auction has been scheduled to end.
- Step 4: Once the auction ends the highest bidder will be notified by an email that he has won the auctioned product. The product is delivered to the customer on successful payment from his end.
*Psst* – In case of proxy bidding the difference in the bidding process will be that a bidder will define the maximum amount that he is willing to spend on a particular product. From there on the system automatically increases the bid amount until the maximum amount is reached. If the bidding process is still not completed the bidder will be notified and can revise the maximum bid amount if required.
Are these Questions Playing on Your Mind?
Q. Will bidders be notified when a new bid is placed for a product they have bid for?
Yes. An email will be sent to a bidder notifying them that they have been outbid. Additionally an email will also be sent to the admin and the product owner every time a new bid is placed for a particular auctioned product.
Q. How to account for the shipping costs that I will incur on product delivery?
You can use the shipping cost add-on if you want to explicitly charge a customer for the delivery charges of an auctioned product.
Q. I have a consolidated file with all the products that I want to add to the auction website. Is there some way to post all these products on the website in one go?
There is an option to upload and download a CSV file to and from the website respectively. By fulfilling certain prerequisites like mandatory columns, this requirement should be fulfilled.
Q. What if the bidder has some questions for the product owner?
A bidder can use the comments section or the private message section on the auction page to communicate with the product owner. The comments section can also be used to communicate with other bidders of the product.
By merely spending $79 on the Ultimate Auction plugin, a few hundred dollars on the hosting charges for the website and some more dollars on basic add-ons for the website you can easily take off your auction business. Of course, you can always keep expanding the website to keep adding more functionalities. But these additional functionalities can be incorporated with the money coming in from the website at a later point in time. As far as starting your business on a budget is concerned you are good to go.
[space]
[space]
[freepik]
