Silent auction lots: bid from the room, fairly

A silent auction is the part of a fundraising evening where the software most often embarrasses the organiser in front of a room full of guests. Two people are told they are winning the same lot; a bid vanishes; the whole thing runs until someone remembers to close it. TicketRoyality runs auction lots guests bid on from their phones, and the design starts from the failures, not the happy path.

One bid is one transaction

"Read the high bid, add the increment, write it back" is the classic lost-update bug, and in an auction it does not merely lose data — it tells two people in the same room that they are winning, which is the exact moment an organiser stops trusting the screen in front of their guests. So a bid is a single transaction. Tested with simultaneous bids, it produces exactly one leader and counts exactly one bid. The person who lost the race is told the real current price — "it is £120 now" — rather than a bare error, because by the time a bid lands the lot has usually moved, and a next step beats a dead end.

Anti-sniping: a lot ends when bidding ends

A hard cut-off rewards the fastest connection over the highest bidder, so a bid placed inside the final window pushes the close out a little. A lot therefore ends when the bidding ends, not when the clock happens to run out. Earlier bids leave the time alone, or a lot with steady interest would run all night. And the lots close on a schedule, not on someone remembering to press a button — the one evening nobody presses it is the evening the auction runs until morning.

What a bidder can and cannot see

An auction is public about money and private about people. The screen shows the current price, how many bids a lot has had, and whether you are the one leading — never who else is bidding. You cannot outbid yourself, because raising your own winning bid only lifts the price you will pay and makes it look like the room is being milked. Whether a reserve has been met is shown, because a room bidding towards a wall it cannot see simply stops; the reserve amount itself is not, because that is your floor, not theirs.

Setting one up, and why it stays calm

A lot is attached to an event, given a starting price, a bid increment and an optional reserve, and it is live for guests to bid on from their own phones — no app to install, no queue at a clipboard. Because the price only ever moves up by the increment inside a transaction, and because you cannot raise your own leading bid, the number on the screen is always the real one, and the room can trust it. That trust is the whole point: a silent auction works when guests believe the display, and stops the instant they do not.

A bid buys goods, not a gift

A winning bid buys the lot, so it is a purchase and never touches the Gift Aid path — no reclaim is attempted on it, because an auction win is goods changing hands, not a donation. A lot that never meets its reserve closes unsold, because the reserve is your floor and selling under it was never the deal. Every bid is kept, not only the winning one, because "who bid what, and when" is always the question afterwards. Two honest limits, stated rather than hidden: there are no automatic maximum bids yet, and the live price updates on a short poll rather than a live socket.