This is a website to allow clubs and individuals to buy and sell fish, reptiles, amphibians, food cultures, and other pet keeping supplies.
Create a test auction here. Make sure to uncheck promote this auction, and set the end date for tomorrow.
If you create an online auction, you'll get a series of emails walking you through exactly what to do. Most people find running an online auction a lot easier than running an in-person one!
This site does not get involved in disputes
There are a couple things you can do here:
If you run a club auction and there's an issue with a lot, you'll find a button to issue a partial or full refund on the lot's page.
Please limit the lots you sell to fish, reptiles, amphibians, food cultures, and related pet keeping supplies.
You cannot buy or sell anything illegal. If you spot someone selling something illegal, please contact us (using the email address at the bottom of this page) and we'll remove the lot in question and ban the user if they continue to submit illegal items.
The only time this has happened, the user did not know the item they were selling was illegal. (Mike is kind of an idiot like that...)
Yes: When you create a lot, there's an option to sell this lot independently. This site does not charge any fees for selling. However, remember that clubs bring a huge value to you as a seller:
Also remember that clubs provide knowledge and community. This hobby would not be what it is today without them!
A club auction that has multiple locations to pick up and drop off lots greatly increases participation. You can read more about how these work here
You can only add multiple locations to an online auction; in-person auctions are limited to a single location.
There's two ways to do this, you can use both in the same auction with no issues.
The first way: pre-registration:
The second way: manually add them
It's often handy to have multiple people helping with sign up or recording bids. Fortunately, it's easy to get help:
Note that this is matched by the email address, so if it's not working, there's a pretty good chance that the user you're trying to add isn't using the email address you think they are. They can confirm what email they are using here
Anyone with admin permissions to run the auction can add lots for any user:
Yes! Upload your video to YouTube, then put the YouTube link the Reference link field when editing your lot. The video will automatically be embedded next to any images you have.
Yes. Any auction admin can change a bidder number when editing the user. Lots that have already been added or sold will still appear correctly on the invoice for that user.
Lot numbers cannot be changed -- this would create all sorts of issues with labels that have already been printed.
When adding a lot to a club auction, there's a checkbox for breeder points. (If you don't see it, make sure Use Breeder Points is checked.)
This checkbox allows you to track any lots that were home grown in your auction in two ways:
Yes -- create an in-person auction and set online bidding to allowed.
This process can be a bit confusing for users, so make sure to watch the tutorial video on hybrid auctions.
Running a hybrid auction is not recommended for new users; stick to only in person or only online auctions until your club is familiar with the site.
Yes - in your auction rules, check Only approved sellers and/or Only approved bidders (note that only approved bidders is not available for in-person auctions, since all bids have to be entered by admins).
You'll then need to manually approve people by clicking on their name in the list of users in your auction. You can also filter your users list to show only people who can't bid or can't sell: type no bid or no sell in your users filter to see these people.
Under your auction's rules, set Custom field for lots to Optional or Required, and then set the Custom field name to whatever you want, like Scientific name. collection location, etc.
Under your action's rules, check Use custom checkbox field, then set the Custom checkbox name to CARES.
It's up to users to remember to check this box when entering their lots.
This information will appear on the label, on lot pages, and in the lot CSV file you can export.
Assuming you have a list of club members in Google Sheets or Excel, make sure that the first row contains the following labels:
All of these fields are optional, but you'll need either name or email (preferably both). Club member should say "Yes" or "Member" for club members, and can be blank for non-members. If you need an example file, you can export a list of users already in your auction on the Users tab.
Save your club member list in CSV format with UTF-8 encoding
In your auction on this website, go to Users>Bulk Add Users>Import From CSV
Choose the CSV file you exported -- you'll get a warning if any columns are missing (this warning is safe to ignore), and a message about how many users were added. If something went wrong, you'll see that too.
Proxy bidding is a simple way to avoid needing to place multiple bids on a lot during an auction.
It's simplest to explain with an example:
No. That would encourage people to snipe lots by telling them exactly when to click bid.
The closest thing to a countdown is a Bidding on this lot ends in less than a minute message that appears in the chat one minute before bidding ends.
If you're running an online auciton, you don't need to do anything; users will bid and then the winners will be declared automatically. If you're running an in-person auction, you'll need to manually set the winner and winning price on each lot. Fortunately there's any easy tool for this:
In larger in-person auctions, up to 5% of lots can be sold to the wrong bidder or for the wrong price due to typos. Fortunately, there's a simple way to double check things: Have two people record winners at the same time.
These people need to be made auction admins, and both will select More>Set Lot Winners. As an example, Alice and Bob are recording winners.
Alice enters lot 5, sell price $10, winning bidder 345. She'll see the usual message that the lot has been sold. Bob enters lot 5, sell price $10, winning bidder 345. He'll see a message that the lot has been validated.
Alice enters lot 6, sell price $5, winning bidder 200. As before, she'll see the usual message that the lot has been sold. Bob enters lot 6, sell price $6, winning bidder 200. Bob will get a red warning message that the lot has already been sold, and he'll have the option to undo the sale and correct the information.
This will almost completely eliminate typos, since it's unlikely Alice and Bob will make the exact same typos. And, it doesn't have to be done in real time -- the validation can happen at any time, even from paper slips after the auction has ended. But, it's best to catch errors immediately if at all possible, so it's a good idea to have two people recording bids if you can!
This site does not handle payments If we did, we'd need to charge a 30% fee, like other sites do.
That said, the site will generate invoices for your auction automatically.
You can easily export a list of these invoices to import into Paypal. Note that only people who owe you money are included in this; you'll need to send money to sellers separately. Some clubs mail a check to sellers to avoid Paypal fees.
You do not need to use this feature -- if you'd prefer to use cash, go right ahead.
While I have better things to do than rat you out to the IRS, you probably do need to charge sales tax in your auctions. This is true whether you use this site or not, don't shoot the messenger. There's an option you can enable for sales tax in the rules.
On the users tab, click the user's name, then check the club member checkbox. Make sure you also set up a club member split in the rules!
Sometimes you'll have someone who has bought and sold a bunch of stuff, and wants to leave before the auction has ended. To make sure their lots are fully paid for:
This site is owned by the Tropical Fish Club of Burlington.
It's completely open source and the Github repo is here
This site is load-tested regularly, and supports well over 20 requests per second without issue. In practice, this means that 200-300 users can all simultaneously bid, browse lots, etc., without experiencing any slowdowns in your online auctions. The site does start to slow down when more people than that are using it, but for most fish club auctions, this is more than enough.
If you anticipate that you'll need to have more users than this, please reach out and let's discuss it further.
For in-person auctions, there's essentially no limit to the number of users, as only the admins running your auction will actually use the site.
As you browse the site, the categories you view and bid on are recorded.
Your interest in each category is then calculated (bids are worth 10x what a view is. There's a bit of randomness involved, too, just to keep things interesting). Finally, lots you haven't viewed are shown to you.
Of course, this only happens if you sort the lot list by recommended, or are viewing a single lot. If you're viewing a lot from an auction, only other lots from that auction will be shown.
We never sell data on your interests or do anything with them other than give you recommended lots.
Bids placed in the last 15 minutes before bidding ends will extend the end time.
Online auctions require users to have an account on this site, so this isn't possible with online auctions. But, with in-person auctions:
If someone joins your in-person auction through this website, they will get:
If you manually add someone to your in-person auction, they will only get the email with a view invoice link.
You can control whether or not invoice emails are sent by checking or unchecking Invoice Notifications in your auction's rules.
A promotion email is sent reminding people to join your auction when:
If a user replies to any of these emails, you (the auction creator) will get the reply.
When viewing the list of users in your auction, you'll see that some of them have a little envelope next to their names.
Note that invalid email addresses are only detected when sending the invoice notification email. This means that if their email is invalid, they won't have a way to view their invoice. But, when you add these people to your next auction, you'll see the red envelope next to their name as a reminder to get their correct email address.
Why isn't the email address validated immediately? Validating an email address requires sending an email, and users find it annoying to get extra emails. The system as it works right now is a good balance: users get only a single, useful, email with their invoice, and you can catch invalid emails in the next auction.