This glossary is a list of terms used in our Auction Factory Component (Auction System for Joomla Content Management System - CMS).

 

Bidding is an offer (often competitive) of setting a price one is willing to pay for something. A price offer is called a BID. The term may be used in context of auctions, stock exchange or card games.

"Bidding up" means rising a price for an item by a series of rising bids. It may be unlawful, if done by a group of persons with an interest in rising the price. In traditional auctions, bidding up is a natural course of events. Since 1990s, with the emergence of online auctions, reverse auctions gained popularity, in which the traditional roles of buyers and sellers are reversed, and the goal of bidding is to drive the price down, similar to bid shopping practice of selecting a contractor to do a job.

A bid price is a price offered by a buyer/bidder when he buys a good, usually referred to as simply the "bid".

In bid and ask, the bid price stands in contrast to the ask price or "offer", and the difference between the two is called the bid/offer spread.

An unsolicited bid or offer is when a person or company receives a bid even though they are not looking to sell. A bidding war is said to occur when a large number of bids are placed in rapid succession by two or more entities, especially when the price paid is much greater than the ask price, or greater than the first bid in the case of unsolicited bidding.

In the context of stock trading on a stock exchange, the bid price is the highest price a buyer of a stock is willing to pay for a share of that given stock. The bid price displayed in most quote services is the highest bid price in the market.

 

BIN or BuyItNow Auction. The seller gives you the opportunity to purchase the item right away without waiting for an online auction to end. - Fixed price listings -

BIN (BuyItNow) price is the Price at witch the item is sold imedialty. This means in theory if one buyer agrees to pay this price he is automatically the winner.

For  manual auctions you can choose to manually accept BIN (it can be useful if you have doubts about the quality of some bidders, and you first  want to check them out, or have a chat).

Buy It Now can be very useful to shorten auction time. Once choosen, the BIN Buyer becomes the winner and the auction closes.

 

Proxy Bidding is an implementation of an English second-price auction used on eBay, in which the winning bidder pays the price of the second-highest bid plus a defined increment. It differs from a Vickrey auction in that bids are not sealed; the "current highest bid" (defined as second-highest bid plus bid increment) is always displayed. In a standard first-price English auction the winner pays the amount of their bid, regardless of competitors' bids, and it is therefore desirable to place a bid that exceeds the current highest bid by the smallest possible increment. Under proxy bidding, however, the price paid is determined only by competitors' bids and not by the amount of the new bid, and so there is no economically rational incentive to place a bid below the amount one is willing to pay, or to place multiple increasing bids. An "economically rational" bidder will therefore bid the maximum amount they are willing to pay on their first bid, and never raise their bid.

 

In a private auction the identities of the bidders are hidden, so anyone that buys the item can remain anonymous. This is normally done for either security reasons such as rare gems or art, or to avoid embarrassment if the item is more risque.

In a public auction, the bidders' identities are not hidden and anyone is welcome to attend the auction.

 

If the type is Automatic Auction the auction will end automatically and the winner will be also automatically selected.

If the type is Manual Auction the winner will be manually choosen by the offertant.

 

A Watchlist is a feature on websites that allow a user to watch, track, or see current activity of, a list of favorite pages. It is used on auction sites such as eBay to see current activity of items one may want to bid on. It is also used on Wikipedia to allow users to see current revisions of their favorite articles.