Create auction site joomla hosting

Websites implementing Auction Systems are no longer singularities in our web space. In the modern world supply and demand meet much more easier thanks to the internet. Selling goods on the internet is no longer a novelty, and ventures like eBay or Amazon are living proof. For a niche shop having its own auction site is a huge sales improvement. Even if you are listing items on eBay or other large auction websites – there is nothing like having an owned site, where you can control most of the variables. Having an auction site is greatly improving the measurability of the incoming traffic and optimizing exposure of your products.

hosting

Looking into today’s hosting market we can clearly see that php is one of the most used servers side scripting engines. Its popularity derives from the fact that it's free software – licensed under GNU/GPL, but not only – also the huge scale that php programming has come to. Our statistics show that 18% of all the freelancing jobs posted on RentACoder in the last year were based on PHP or PHP related. This is an increase of 20% compared to 2006. The easy access to the hosting, software, affordable programmers created the premises for PHP to become the leading platform for auction based websites.

We looked into several standalone auction scripts based on php.
- phpauction – has several packages, encrypted and full source with price ranging 315$- 1113$. Templates for phpauction range from 35$ to 150$ on their webpage, and very few 3rd party templating options.
- Phprpobid – just one software package –encrypted - with price 168$ for the package and template design around 600$. There are some 3rd party templates with pricing range starting from 120$

All these scripts lacked one huge thing: scalability, open source and an open-end. Their weakness is that this scripts ARE auction scripts. And nothing more. But in our world a niche website must provide not only an auction platform. it needs content, it needs media, it need community enabling software. of course some might argue. get these as free scripts. Ok, but how about the userbase, must we build bridges for all these scripts? or should the user have a login for each of these scripts? Would YOU care to use a website that requires you to login into their auction system, then login for the forums, then another login for instant messaging? I doubt it!

There was an obvious solution to this “dilemma” -using a content management system that allows plugins and that has some community building features. After browsing for several free CMS like drupal, typo, silverstripe, joomla – we settled for joomla since it was the only one with a functional fully featured and supported auction plugin. Al thou the extension is commercial, we were very thrilled that it had all the features we needed. As it turned out the fact that it is commercial is more of an advantage then a nuisance, since the support provided for this component is outstanding – by far better that any free component or script provider has ever offered us.

Create auction site joomla hosting wizard will guide you

Joomla has the advantage of scalability – you can use a lot of little bricks (modules, extensions, plugins) to create a unique site. There are a lot of free and great templates for joomla, but we settled on a commercial one from rocketthemes

So lets review the tools of the trade:

Installing Joomla is an easy job. Upload the files in your web server, then visit your server URL. a wizard will guide you through the whole process.

At this point I would be advisable to familiarize yourself with the Joomla administrator panel . Joomla is build around some major concepts – the template, the components (extensions), the modules and the plugins (aka mambots).


The joomla template defines the surrounding, and the places in the webpage that will display your content. Most modern templates have a lot of javascript and template specific modules (menus, content rotators, etc)


The extensions are the actual applications that take charge of the joomla system when called. For instance the article display is done by a component (com_content). All component code lies in the components folder (and administrator/components).When you call a joomla webpage there has to be one component active (the most use entry page component is the native com_frontpage – that displays front-page articles).


Modules are the WebPages little helpers. these are snippets of code that are executed in specific template locations (you can set these in administrator/modules). Take for instance an exchange rate module. There is no need for this module to take any specific actions or have some complex interaction with the user. it is just an information printed on the left side of the webpage (or in whatever position we desire)


Plugins are the silent workers. these are event triggered actions that can change the content or perform security checks (for instance check if your subscription fee was timely played). Most plugins are content altering (for instance replace a certain tag in your article with an adsense code)

At this point we should have settled on a template and installed it (here is a tutorial regarding the templates)
The next step is to install community builder.

Community Builder v 1.1 can be downloaded from joomlapolis.com for free, or the next version that supports also Joomla 1.5 for a club membership fee.

After installing Community Builder you have to set up the fields that make up an user profile. These can be added and managed from Community Builder Field Management.
For our example we will add the usual Contact Data (name surname, address, phone ) and some special Fields that will be used for our auction system: Verified, Powerseller, isSeller, isBuyer and Paypal_email. These fields (besides the email field ) are tick boxes with value 1 for ticked. We will explain their use later on.

Next step is adding the Auction Component. This is installed as any normal component – you can see a tutorial here.

After a successful install we have to set up the Auction System. go to Components, Auction Factory. General Settings.
There are several settings that I needed to adjust:

1. Image and thumbnail size. The script automatically resizes the auction related images to a certain size – thumbnail is for the list view (browsing mode) and the middle size is for the auction details gallery view.
2. Setting up the Max month of availability – set up how many month an auction can run maximally -this way you avoid never ending auctions, use something in the area of 2-3 months
3. Set up the Minimum increase: this is the minimum amount a bid has to be risen by the consequent bidders. This can be overridden by the Auctioneer when he creates a new auction
4. Set up if you allow unlogged users to send messages to auctioneers. I disabled this option. I really need users to subscribe to my site in order to ask questions
5. ACL: this settings is for auctions sites that want to keep the allowed to bid and allowed to post auctions as separate user groups. This way you could allow just some “handpicked” users to post auctions. Normally webmasters allow all users to bid, but have an auctioneer group that pay some subscription fee in order to have their auctions listed. This option is more for a mature site – since a just starting site is not able to get enough traffic from starters in order to have the auctioneers pay. You can use the Joomla standard groups to make this separation, or to have the profile driven ACL enabled – that allows you to have a field in the profile that enables users to bid or post auctions. This second option is for a website that requires more micromanagement in order to run.
6. Set up the allowed Currencies – use Paypal short names for the currencies if you will use Paypal for payments.
7. Payment types: this are the option the auctioneer will have for his auction. Don’t mistake them for payment gateways that are included with Auction factory! This Payment types is just an info for the bidder of his payment options after he wins. This would include: Cash on delivery, Bank payment, checks …
8. RSS Settings: great syndication settings for Auctions factory. You can publish RSS feeds with your latest auctions or users can include their Auction RSS channel in their sites (the auctions they published – just like eBay allows you to)
9. Terms and Conditions: this is the part where the legal stuff of your site has to go. You should put your T&C and disclaimer in this part, user will have to agree to them in order to post auctions and to post bids. You can disable this by leaving T&C empty. This way users do not have to agree to T&C in order to bid or to post auctions. You can put then your T&C in some regular content in your site

Having this set up, we have to configure the Community Builder integration. Auction Factory is very open to Community Builder and it allows you to use any CB field definitions to store profile info. You just have to tell AF where to look for this info. For instance, you could name the city field of the profile “town” or “usercity” - you just have to make the correspondence to Auction Factory so it knows where to look. This setup is done in the extensions “CB integration” menu in admin settings. Here you must choose the corresponding fields from CB that store the specific information.
My setup looked like this:


You can use the Powerseller and Verified user field in order to have certain users (Powerseller) to have lower rates on auction fees (if they post some large number of auctions monthly, or for some flat fee that would urge them to post more auctions in order to get it covered), or to have some trusted users that would draw more bids to their auctions.

My next step was to configure payments. Auctions Factory supports several payment gateways (moneybookers, Paypal) and has a lot of items that you can charge for. You can for instance charge for bids, for placing an auction, for having the contact info of an auctioneer, or for having you listing featured. Lets have a look at these items:

Enables you to charge auctioneers for every auction they place. When users proceed to place a new auction, they are guided through a payment process that give the user auction listing credits upon payment confirmed. This way your site can monetize the popularity gained and charge users to have their items listed. I recommend this for mid-aged websites on the verge of their maturity. A new born website would not have the notoriety to back up these charges. Every auction site should start with free listings in order to get as many as possible

Webmasters can enable this payment item in order to charge auctioneers with a percentage of the winning bid. This way you can ensure that higher priced merchandise will be charged a higher amount then a lower priced one. This is a fair charging and it is widely accepted by most users. Commissions are gathered for a period of time (a month or every 2 weeks) and a bill is issued in that amount to the auctioneer. He has to pay this through Paypal or Moneybookers, but you can manually enter payments if you receive checks or bank wire.

This is the best starting option to ensure income for a new site. Featured auctions are golden, silver and bronze. Gold auction will ensure that your item is listed always on top of the listing in the category or in the main listing as long as you auction is active. Silver and bronze will just ensure some special formatting that makes the user more attentive to that listing.

A special business model is the pay for contacting the auctioneer model. You can charge your users for getting the auctioneers true identity. That means if a user wins an auction he has no means on getting the product unless he pays your website to release the information. This model works, but you have to be attentive on user communication in the website. Users tend to give the information away – so the best option would be to disable user messages for this business model

This model works best for websites where the webmaster places very low starting auctions. For instance you could start a laptop selling for 1 usd. and you could charge 10 usd per bid. The increase could as well be 0.10 usd. If you get a hundred bids on this item, the price will increase just with 10$, but your website would have earned a 1000 usd. This way selling a laptop at 10$ is a bargain for the winner, and it is a winning opportunity for the auction site too. Of course the website should not start with laptop auctions, but with smaller value

Last, but not least you will have to adapt the looks of the Auctions listings and User profile to match your template.

This was a very nice surprise from the Auctions Factory creators – display customization is very easy doable through a well thought templating system based on smarty. There was no php skill required and with some nice html and CSS tricks my auction website looked unique and appealing to the new user. Since this extension blends perfectly in our website, users have the ease to find their way to the features without having to ask around.

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