Show HN: Auctionnow.io – Launch a store to sell items via auction or buy-it-now
auctionnow.ioHi HN - I'm Chris and my co-founder--Jacob--and I built a platform (https://auctionnow.io) that lets anyone launch an online store that lets you run real-time auctions and sell fixed priced items. Think of it like if Shopify and eBay had a baby.
The idea for AuctionNow.io evolved from the comics and collectibles marketplace we built called Raremarq. With Raremarq, we noticed sellers were earning as much as 10x more with our auctions compared to other platforms like eBay, and we started getting requests from charities, content creators, TCG sellers, fashion designers, and a bunch more asking to use our tech for their own websites.
So, we thought "what if we made an auction app for Shopify?". We launched this and it did well, but Shopify doesn’t let us auto charge auction winners, which was a new pain point we discovered. So, to get this really right we decided to turn our auction and ecommerce technology into a standalone platform in AuctionNow.io.
The backend handles the complex parts of auction logic: - Real-time updates: Bids are pushed instantly to the client so users don't need to refresh. - Soft Closes: To prevent "sniping," the auction creates a sliding window (e.g., adds 30 seconds) if a bid comes in at the very end. - Payment enforcement: We require bidders to link a payment method via Stripe, and winners are auto-charged. This solves the "non-paying bidder" problem common on eBay. - It supports physical goods with shipping tracking and digital products (e.g. PDFs and links) with automated file delivery.
It is free to launch a shop with up to 4 active listings, and you can list physical and digital products and sell them as auctions, buy it now, or a hybrid of both. We have a Pro tier for unlimited listings and we plan to add custom domains soon (#1 Pro feature request), but right now we are just looking for feedback on the bidding UX and whether the flexibility makes sense for your use cases.
Happy to answer questions about the stack, the auction mechanics, or anything else! Auction mechanics are genuinely underused in the digital goods space. We've been building a marketplace on Solana and debated adding auctions for a while. The thing that stopped us was the UX complexity around "auction ending soon" notifications and bid sniping behavior. Did you end up implementing any anti-sniping logic (like auto-extending the auction if a bid comes in the last 30 seconds)? That's the single feature that makes or breaks trust for buyers who lose to a last-second bot. Also curious how you're handling the edge case where a buyer wins an auction but doesn't complete payment. With physical goods especially, that creates real headaches for sellers. Stripe's authorization-hold flow can help but it's clunky to explain to non-technical sellers. The buy-it-now alongside auction is the right call btw. eBay's data on this is old but the pattern of "auction with BIN escape hatch" consistently converts better than pure auctions for sellers who just want to move inventory.