Supplier Auction Manual

Our Supplier Auction has two modes:
  • Owner: which applies to the owner and his/her employees.
  • Supplier: for the potential suppliers who visit the website to bid for a supply contract.

    In Supplier and Owner mode the website has the following buttons:

  • Categories: Displays the default page, a list of categories of the supplies being auctioned. For example for a furniture factory they would be: Connectivity, Mechanisms, Metallic parts, Packaging, Paints, Plastic parts, Wooden parts. When one clicks on a category, providing that that category has items, a list of items auctioned under this category is displayed.
  • New user: For anyone either employee of the owner or supplier to use the Supplier Auction site, he/she has to register as a new user first. After entering their details and selected a user name, they are sent an automated email (in order to verify that they entered a legitimate email address) containing their password. With their user name and password they are able to use the Supplier Auction site.
  • Change User Details: This allows users to change their password (to a more convenient one), their name, telephone and address.
  • Closed Auctions: This allows users to view auctions for items that have expired, in other words closed, in order to see the bidders or the final bid. Users can only see auctions that they have created or bid on.

    Additionally the Owner has these exclusive buttons:

  • New item: This allows the owner's users to create new items to be auctioned.
  • Cancel auction: This allows for cancellation of an item for whatever reason (e.g. contains erroneous information or is withdrawn).
  • View user details: Shows any user's stored details (email, name, address, telephone).

    Tips for easier use

  • On all pages with forms, you can just start typing in the first field, no mouse click is needed.
  • To go from one field to the next one, just press the TAB button TAB
  • When you finished entering a form you can just press Enter or use the mouse to press the button.

    • Bidding procedure

    A supplier is informed about the new way to get a contract with the owner (i.e. the owners auction site). The supplier visits the owner’s SupplierAuction site and registers as a user.

    Then he views the available categories and selects one that he can supply for (e.g. a wood supplier would go to the wooden parts category of the furniture factory example).

    Then he views the items currently listed under the selected category and he selects one.

    After reading the detailed item description (containing quantity, quality, delivery terms, etc), looking at the item's photograph, seeing the current bid and his competitors bid history, he makes his calculations and makes a lower bid. The moment he bids, the previous lowest bidder automatically gets emailed that he has been outbid and is invited to bid again. In other words, he knows that for a bit less he can get the contract and goes in again and outbids the current bidder by a little less. There is a feature called stepping, that the owner defines for each auction, so that this "little less" is no less than the defined "step" in order to avoid bidders outbidding each other by very small amounts. (e.g. for a £100000 auction a logical step could be £500).

    The essence of the SupplierAuction is that this outbidding and automatic emailing can happen many times in the duration of an auction (up to a month), with suppliers constantly bidding a bit lower to get the desired contract. The best part is that all this happens completely automatically with the owner not needing to do absolutely anything. When an auction finishes, both the winner and the owner are automatically emailed with each other’s contact details and the winning bid amount (i.e. the lowest possible quote for that supply contract).

    Another optional feature is the "reserve price" that allows the owner to specify a price above which he considers a quote to be unacceptable. In other words, when the owner creates an auction he puts a starting price (which is usually a bit high, to lure suppliers to start competing) and optionally a reserve price to indicate to the bidders when a bid they just made is acceptable or not (bidders don’t actually see the reserve price, just whether their bid is over or under it).

    Another feature is the "sniper protection": There is a typical trick bidders use at auctions, they wait for the last possible seconds before an auction closes and then they bid in order for the current bidder not to have time to counter-bid them. In that case our SupplierAuction automatically extends the opening time of an auction for a further 5 minutes.

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    © 2002 Intelligent Firmware