Estate sale auction software that you own outright. Run unlimited sales on your own branded platform — no percentage taken on hammer prices, no marketplace collecting your bidders, no ongoing fee that grows with your volume.
Commission figures based on published marketplace rates. Actual savings depend on your GMV and plan choice. All PHP Pro Bid plans are zero-commission.
Most estate sale auction platforms are marketplaces. They provide the software and the audience in one package, and in exchange they take a percentage of every hammer price — indefinitely. The more volume you run, the more you pay them.
When you're starting out, that percentage feels manageable. When you're running multiple sales per month at consistent GMV, it becomes your largest operational cost — larger than staff, larger than marketing, larger than any other single line item.
The alternative is a platform you own. A flat fee, paid once or monthly, with nothing taken from what your buyers pay.
A 2–3% cut on every sale means every improvement you make to your business makes your platform cost more. The fee is uncapped.
On a marketplace platform, registered bidders belong to the platform. They can be marketed to by other sellers. You can't take your list with you if you leave.
Marketplace platforms build their brand on your sales. Buyers remember the marketplace name, not your business. Every auction you run strengthens someone else's platform.
If the marketplace raises commission rates, changes its terms, or is acquired — you have no recourse. Your business depends on their decisions.
Name your sale, set the dates, configure the closing schedule. Each lot gets its own staggered countdown — minutes apart, keeping bidding active across the whole catalog.
Add lots individually or upload in bulk. Photos, descriptions, reserve prices, starting bids — set per lot. Hundreds of items are manageable in one session.
Registered bidders place proxy bids. Soft close extensions keep competition alive on active lots. Outbid alerts bring buyers back automatically — no manual work on your end.
When the last lot closes, the platform invoices every buyer for all lots they won — one invoice per buyer. No manual reconciliation. Payments collected automatically.
Every feature below is native to PHP Pro Bid — not a plugin, not an integration, not an add-on you pay extra for.
Lots close minutes apart in sequence rather than all at once. Bidding stays active across the full catalog, keeping buyers engaged throughout the sale.
Buyers set a maximum bid — the platform increments automatically on their behalf. Soft close extends the lot if a bid arrives in the final minutes, preventing sniping.
Every time a buyer is outbid, an automated email notification fires. No manual work. Return bids drive final prices higher without any intervention from you.
Upload hundreds of lots at once from a CSV or spreadsheet. Add photos in batch. Estate clearances with large catalogs are manageable without entering lots one by one.
When bidding closes, every buyer receives a single consolidated invoice for all lots they won. No manual reconciliation. Payments are collected through your integrated gateway.
Your domain, your logo, your colors — the front end carries your brand throughout, not a generic template. Every bidder registers on your site and stays in your database. Full unbranding, removing every last reference to PHP Pro Bid, is available as a paid add-on.
Set a minimum threshold per lot that must be met before it sells. Reserve prices are hidden from bidders — they only see that a reserve exists, not the amount.
Buyers browse and bid from any device without an app download. The bidding interface is fully functional on mobile — no friction, no separate experience.
Track active lots, current high bids, bidder activity, and revenue in real time during the sale. Post-sale reports cover all transactions and buyer details.
Estate sale auctions have specific operational requirements that general auction software doesn't always address well. The core needs are:
PHP Pro Bid addresses all of these natively, without plugins or integrations.
No. PHP Pro Bid charges zero transaction fees on all plans. You pay a flat fee for the software, a one-time license or a monthly plan, and keep 100% of your auction revenue. There is no percentage taken on hammer prices, no per-lot fee, and no minimum commission.
This is the core financial distinction from marketplace platforms, which typically charge 2–3% of every sale on top of a monthly subscription. For a liquidator running £500k/year in GMV, that commission represents £10,000–£15,000 per year — paid annually, growing as the business grows, with no end point.
On PHP Pro Bid, the cost of running more auctions is zero. The software does not get more expensive as your volume increases.
There is no hard cap on lot count per event. PHP Pro Bid does not restrict the number of items, photos, bidders, or events on any plan.
In practice, performance under high simultaneous traffic depends on the hosting environment. For regular estate sales with typical catalog sizes, the standard cloud and managed plans handle load well. For very high-volume operations (multiple large-catalog events running simultaneously with heavy bidder traffic), a Managed VPS on a powerful server provides the dedicated resources needed to maintain performance under load. The self-hosted License plan gives you full control over your server specification.
You do. Every bidder who registers on your PHP Pro Bid platform registers on your site, under your brand, and their data is stored in your database — not in a shared marketplace pool.
On the License and Managed VPS plans, this database sits on your server and is completely under your control. On the Cloud plan, it sits on our infrastructure under your branded subdomain, but it is your data — we never market to your bidders, never share their information with third parties, and never use your bidder pool to benefit other sellers.
This is a fundamental difference from marketplace platforms, where registered bidders are the marketplace's asset. When you build on a marketplace, you're building their audience — not yours.
When you create an Auction Event in PHP Pro Bid, you configure each lot with its own closing time — set minutes apart in sequence. Lot 1 might close at 7:00pm, Lot 2 at 7:03pm, Lot 3 at 7:06pm, and so on through the catalog.
This staggered structure keeps bidding active and competitive across the whole sale rather than concentrating all activity at a single closing moment. Bidders move through the catalog as lots close, placing last-minute bids and returning when outbid notifications arrive.
The soft close extension is built in: if a bid arrives in the final minutes of a lot's countdown, the lot's closing time automatically extends — preventing the "bid sniping" behavior where bidders wait until the last second to avoid competition. Extended closing drives final prices higher.
When the last lot closes, the platform automatically generates a single invoice per buyer covering all the lots they won across the entire event. No manual reconciliation required.
The right plan depends on how much you want to manage technically and what your volume looks like:
All three plans include every feature described on this page. The difference is infrastructure ownership and how much technical involvement you want.
Three plans. All zero-commission. All with every estate sale feature included.
*Full PHP source is included; a small number of licensing/security files are encoded with ionCube.