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What is PHP Pro Bid?

PHP Pro Bid is professional auction software for websites. The software is designed with ease of use in mind, comes packed with many features, and has an easily navigated user interface for all types of users. Deep customization tools make this platform a strong choice for any auction service provider.

About PHP Pro Bid

PHP Pro Bid provides auction software is designed for large or small commercial auctions, as well as online charity events. The auctions can be live or silent, and the software takes care of every aspect, from registering bidders to cashing them out. While some auction software products are versatile enough to support all kinds of auctions, others are meant for a specific industry or product.

Numerous sites use this kind of tool, with Ebay being the most well-known. PHP Pro Bid is a relatively new platform, being initially release in September 2014, and growing quickly in popularity and functionality. As a modern web application platform, the application is built to be responsive and to deal with dynamic information updates for live site features.

Features

The features included with PHP Pro Bid are optimized to help both site administrators and the sellers who use it for their commercial services. It’s a full service platform with deep capabilities for customizing a seller “store” page. Sellers can choose their own logo, customize the meta-data for their products, manage inventory, and set controls for vacation mode should they need to stop selling temporarily.

• Sellers can offer any type of item, physical products, services, and digital goods
• The system is fully integrated with all major payment gateways worldwide
• The platform has integration to global shipping providers and has support for multiple currencies
• Buyers have access to a comprehensive set of auction tools, a detailed shopping cart, and many different choices for checkout services
• Sellers are able to full control their inventory with stock controls, ordering, and automatic invoicing
• Users can fully manage their account with profile controls
• A built in messaging system allows communication between buyers, sellers and administrators
• A full service feedback system allows for user reviews and customer feedback
• Sellers have full control over their product categories, including metadata tags and multiple content types
• An easy to use HTML editor exists for creating detailed custom product listings
• Media files for digital goods can be uploaded and stored on the service
• “Bid-Sniping” protection can be configured by admins.
• Automatic notifications exist for bidders, as well as the ability to watch items or redact bids.

PHP Pro Bid also supports reverse auctions, in which buyers may source providers.  Buyers may also make offers on items without any bids, and the seller decides whether or not to accept these offers. The entire platform has been created to service buyers, sellers, and administrators with the finely tuned controls that major bidding sites often don’t allow. For Administrators, the Admin Area allows:

• The ability to manage users, auctions, and ads.
•  Take advantage of fee and invoice control.
• Customize your site’s high level categories.
• Update content, and enable or disable the various PHP Pro Bid features.
• Selection of skins lets you further customize with high quality visuals.
• Review and data on both sellers and buyers.

While the platform is relatively young, themes generally need to be converted from Bootstrap pure HTML5 themes into PHP Pro Bid themes. This process costs money, and can be delivered by the developers of the project, or manually converted.

Hosting & Installation

PHP Pro Bid offers several different own hosting packages, which include up to 3 GB of storage space but 100GB of monthly bandwidth for the top tier. This hosting solution comes with a the cPanel control panel, email accounts and database support. Other hosting providers exist and can be more economic to use.

If you opt for a different host, ensure your server has at least 10 megabytes of storage, PHP 4 or above, and at least one MySQL database. Installation through their service is instantaneous. Some cPanel hosts might have one-click install scripts as well. Manually installation works best on linux-apache servers, but can run on Windows as well. Any webserver which supports PHP can work.

Should I setup an auction platform website or use an auction service provider? It depends on your business case. A service provider will take a portion of the profit generated, but will not cost you anything to run the physical servers. Hosting PHP Pro Bid or an alternative will cost more money to run, but it will allow you as the administrator to make profit from the sellers on your site. You’ll want to understand the cost-benefit analysis of our project and make an informed decision.

Should I choose official hosting, or install it on another provider myself? As with most PHP applications, setup is not too challenging, but long term maintenance can be a chore. One limiting aspect of the official hosting is that no plan offers data above 10 GB. For any auction system where large files are sold as digital goods, picking another provider, or paying for a Content Delivery Network (CDN) might be the way to go.

Comparisons & Alternatives

The competition in the auction web space is relatively small.

• iLance  – one of the larger more established competitors, iLance has a great apps market but some reviews claim it has challenges with customer service.
• Enuuk – not specifically focused on auctions, but fully made for ecommerce, enuuk has internal themes and strong language support.
• RainWorx – a marketplace and auction site with a long standing history but limited theme support.

Additionally, large scale Content Management Systems (CMS) with plugin markets, or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools – can be used for similar auction purposes in some cases.