Written on June 23, 2023 by Randy A. Brown

Estimated read time 5 minutes

WordPress Auction Plugins

Auctions are a great way to sell products online. Consumers get to bid for and compete against other shoppers to purchase your products. This can drive up your prices and make you more money than selling at a fixed price. Fortunately, it’s easy to add auctions to your WordPress website. In this post, we’ll look at the best WordPress auction plugins to help you get a head start on building your auction WordPress website or adding auctions to your existing website.

What WordPress Auction Plugins Need

Auction plugins create a bidding platform on your WordPress website that makes bidding on products intuitive and desirable. They encourage users to search for products and bid on them. The bidding process encourages and drives higher prices and brings visitors back to your site for more bidding in the future. The auction platform should fit naturally with your website’s design and branding.

Auction plugins need to either add a bidding platform to your WordPress website or integrate another platform in a way that looks and feels seamless. They also need to provide a way to list products and allow users to pay for products. This can be accomplished with a stand-alone platform and custom post types, or with WooCommerce integration. Some even allow users to create their own auctions.

Here’s a short list of the main features an auction plugin needs or provides:

An auction custom post type
The bidding platform
Payment gateways
Notifications
Buy now option
User management
Auction management
Communication system
Relisting
Auction badges
Watchlist
Reverse auctions
WooCommerce integration
eBay integration

WordPress Auction Plugins

There are lots of free and premium WordPress auction plugins available. As usual, I’ve selected only the plugins that have excellent ratings, recent updates, and the best features. In most cases, you won’t need more than one auction plugin. Most of these plugins are complete auction packages and have several add-ons in you need more features.

Many include WooCommerce integration. If you need help with WooCommerce, see our articles WooCommerce Hosting: Popular Ecommerce Solution Explained and How to Add Stripe to WooCommerce.

These WordPress auction plugins are in no particular order.

Ultimate WordPress Auction Plugin

Ultimate WordPress Auction Plugin allows you to set up an auction on your website. It includes both a free and a pro version. The free version includes an auction page that shows excerpts of the auctions. The auctions detail page is a custom post type and includes comments and a private message section. It also includes an AJAX admin panel. Any registered user can place a bid. Auctions are shown in your time zone. It connects to your PayPal account for payments.

The pro version allows users to add auctions. It includes credit card payments, an anti-sniping feature, automatic and manual relisting, silent auctions, reverse bidding where vendors bid to the buyer, AJAX bidding, automatic or proxy bidding, and lots more. It also includes widgets to show expired and future auctions. This one includes everything you need to build your auction website.

Ultimate Auction for WooCommerce

Ultimate Auction for WooCommerce was made by the same developer that created the Ultimate WordPress Auction Plugin mentioned above. This auction plugin lets you add auction features to WooCommerce. It includes both a free and a pro version. All the features from the previous plugin are included, but rather than creating a custom post type, it uses the WooCommerce post type to create the auction listings.

WooCommerce is also used for the payment system, so any payment gateways you’re using in WooCommerce are available for your auction payments. This is ideal for websites that already use WooCommerce because there’s no need to add another instance of a payment gateway. This also means you won’t need to create new posts if you already have a WooCommerce product page for the item you want to sell on auction.

YITH Auctions for WooCommerce

YITH Auctions for WooCommerce is a premium plugin that adds an expandable auction system to the WooCommerce platform. Create unlimited auctions from your WooCommerce shop. Set a standard auction or set a reserve auction with a specific price. Set a bidding fee, create a reverse auction, set the minimum price and bidding increment amount, set a buy now price, hide the buy now option once a bid is placed, show a countdown, and lots more.

It also includes lots of bidding options, payment options, rescheduling, admin and bidder tools, and notifications. It already includes more features than most auction plugins, but it can be expanded further with integrations. For example, integrating YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor allows users to create their own auctions. This is the most expensive solution on this list, but it does provide a lot of features for the money.

WooCommerce Simple Auctions

WooCommerce Simple Auctions is a premium plugin that connects with WooCommerce to create a complete auction platform that works like eBay. It does require a few premium add-ons to have a complete eBay clone. It includes regular, proxy, silent, and reverse auctions. You have full control over every detail of the auction. It works with all payment gateways in WooCommerce. Other features include multiple widgets email notifications, AJAX live updates, CSV exports, and lots more.

It also has extensions available to add more features. For example, you can add role-based bidding, verify payment methods, add cronjobs, and add a multi-vendor option adds front-end product submission. A couple of other plugins, Dokan Starter and Dokan Simple Auctions, are recommended for multi-vendor support, as seen in the next auction plugin.

Dokan Simple Auctions

Dokan Simple Auctions isn’t a stand-alone product, but its features make it worth mentioning. Connecting it to the WooCommerce Simple Auctions plugin above allows other users to create their own auctions, creating an online marketplace with multiple vendors. It adds vendor management, vacation, review, subscriptions, store support, product inquiry, Stripe connectivity, and single-product multi-vendor support. This plugin is an add-on and requires WooCommerce Simple Auctions and Dokan Pro to work.

WPAuction Software

WPAuction Software connects with WooCommerce and has both a free and a premium version. The free version includes forward (or standard) auctions, and reverse auctions. It integrates with WooCommerce for payments. Widgets display auctions that are starting soon, ending soon, and upcoming auctions. It supports AJAX, email notifications, scheduling, bid ranges, proxy bidding, a watchlist, anti-sniping, and more.

The pro version lets you create a multi-vendor marketplace on your website. It allows users to create auctions and allows you to charge a fee for vendor registration. It also adds penny auctions which require a fee for each bid. They can buy credits to use for bidding. This helps reduce fake bidding to drive up prices and ensure that only serious buyers bid on products. The auctions can be extended each time someone places a bid.

Auctions Made Easy for WooCommerce

Auctions Made Easy for WooCommerce is a premium plugin that lets you create and manage auctions from your WooCommerce shop. You can force users to register before bidding and you have the option to charge a one-time registration fee and one-time bidding free. Users have their own dashboard to manage their auctions. Users can pay through your standard WooCommerce payment gateways. You can also restrict which payment gateways can be used for the auctions. Auctions can be relisted automatically or manually.

Auctions use the WooCommerce product post type. You have full control over the auction from the admin dashboard. This one hasn’t been updated as recently as the other on this list, but it is available from the WooCommerce website and has a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Auction Nudge

Auction Nudge displays your live eBay auctions on your website. Display the auction feed anywhere with a shortcode. It shows your active items and includes filters. Users can browse multiple pages of items, filter the categories, and search your items by keywords. It also displays your profile information as a badge that includes your feedback rating and registration date. The feedback shows your most recent ratings. Feed options include your username and country.

Choose the theme, language, category list, and the number of items per page, show one page or multiple pages, show a search box, choose to open links in a new tab or the same tab, and choose the image size. Advanced options include the sort order, listing type, filter by keyword, and filter by category ID.

WP-Lister Lite for eBay

WP-Lister Lite for eBay is a free plugin that connects your eBay account to your WooCommerce shop so you can post to eBay from WooCommerce. It makes it easy to choose multiple products from your shop, select pre-defined options, and post on eBay. Create multiple listing profiles to choose from. You can verify your items and get the listing fees before posting. It supports product variations, multiple categories, and more.

Create the listing templates with the WordPress post editor. You can customize the templates with HTML and CSS. You can also import and export templates so you can use premade templates from other developers. Rather than building auctions into your website, this is a great way to use your existing products to post to eBay.

My Auctions Allegro

My Auctions Allegro connections Allegro auctions to WordPress with WooCommerce. It has both a free and a pro version. Import auctions as products, auto sync the stock of the products, and the price of the products, and automatically map the categories. Connect with REST API and/or WebAPI. You can also display Allegro auctions from other users within your WooCommerce shop.

The pro version lets you import orders into WooCommerce, update the status in WooCommerce based on the status in Allegro, sync the stock in both directions between WooCommerce and Allegro, and map categories and attributes. You can manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard. You can also create your own templates for a unique design that matches your branding.

Auction Feed

Auction Feed is a free plugin that allows you to display your eBay listings on your website where visitors can search for your products and then make a purchase on eBay. This keeps them on your website until they’re ready to purchase. Choose the options and styles that work best for your website. Display all your eBay items or use filters to choose which items to show. You can also include more information on your website including descriptions and logos.

The developer is an eBay partner, so they might receive an anonymous referral commission for successful transactions at no cost to the user. This may make the plugin less desirable than the others on this list, so it’s something you’ll have to consider for yourself.

Ending Thoughts

That’s our look at WordPress auction plugins to help you build your next auction website or add auctions to your current website. Auction plugins are a great way to add a way for users to purchase products from your website while promoting and increasing your sales. Many of them integrate with WooCommerce, so you’ll need a WooCommerce account with payment gateways installed. Some also connect to eBay and a few connect eBay to WooCommerce. Setting up an auction on your WordPress website is fairly simple and you have lots of options to choose from. No matter which type of auction plugin you need, you’re sure to find it here in this list.

We want to hear from you. Have you tried any of these WordPress auction plugins? Let us know about your experience in the comments.

Frequently Asked Questions

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WordPress has loads of plugins you can install, some of them are free, but some of them you will need to pay for. You can learn how to use WordPress Plugins on our blog.

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