Reverse Auction Factory is a Joomla component from The Factory that allows the buyer to post the required service or product and the sellers compete to sell their item by offering the best deal. It operates like any auction component except the roles are reversed. In a regular auction the goal is to offer more and more, in reversed auctions prices go down as the suppliers race each other to the sell. 
Users can post the required service and the lowest price they are willing to pay.

As with any Joomla! component you must first create an account and log in. After logging in your Reverse Auction Menu bar should look somewhat like this:

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Before offering or requesting any services you should set up you profile so potential sellers/buyers can see who they are making business with, the more people know about you the more likely they are to trust you. Try to have more than one way of being contacted so people can get hold of you.
Go to "My User Profile" in the Reverse Auction Menu to see your profile along with other information about your activities. The user profile page shows how long you have been a member, when you where last online and if you are online at the moment and the last time you updated your profile. Hits are times other users have viewed your profile.

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Go to "Edit" with your cursor and the "Update Your Profile" bar will show, here you can set the Portrait and Contact Info.
       
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The portrait tab gives you several options like uploading an image from you PC, selecting one in the gallery or remove your current image. After performing the desired action click on update and the picture will change/upload. To discard any changes click cancel.

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The contact info tab contains all your account and contact information, Reverse Auction Factory also features Google Map coordinates. You can set your time zone, country, city and various IM IDs like Yahoo! and Skype. There is also a large text area where you can enter your Area of Expertise, it supports HTML, image from URL and even emoticons.

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Under the text field you will find the meaning of the signs next to each field on your profile page.

 In the "My User Profile" you can also see your Auctions, Bids, Ratings and other information.
The contact info tab will only show the fields with the "Field visible on your profile" icon next to them along with the Area of Expertise.

Under the "My Auctions" tab your auctions are displayed along with the Start/End date, max bid price and the value of the last bid.

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The "My Bids" tab displays the auctions you have bid on with the names of the auctioneers, Start/End date and the bid price.

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The Ratings tab shows the ratings you received on transactions, from which user and on what auction. A message from the rating user is also displayed. Ratings are useful when you are unsure about the credibility of the user.

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 "My Watchlist" shows the auctions you might have added on your watchlist, it shows the auction name, auctioneer, Start/End date and the max bid price.

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In the "My Won Bids" tab you see the auctions you won with their title, auctioneer, end date, bit price and the rating you gave it.

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The "Auction Taskpad" contains shortcuts to the fields in the Reverse Auction Menu along with some info about you, it says if you are part of the sellers or bidders group and if you are a verified user.

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In the Community Builder section you set which fields to display and their position.

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In the Payments section you find the payment items, methods configuration and payments.

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  • The payment items are actual services you charge users for, in the payments items list you see what each item is for, its type, price and currency. To enable or disable them click on the icon in the Enabled column.
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For most Payment Items you need only to set the price and currency.

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There are more complex Items that require a much extensive setup. For instance the Commission Payment item.

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First you have the commission percent, the percent of commission perceived from won amount at every finished transaction.
The bidders balances tab shows all users on your website with their current balance, last payment date and commission details.

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The commission details show the bidder, balance and last commission payments. You can send him a payment notice here if he is late. Underneath this there is a list with the auctions he has participated in.
 
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  • The Payments tab shows payments made to you, you can also manually add a payment where you enter the user and amount. 
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The Send notices tab is used to send notifications to users as reminders to pay, you can select to send notification only to users with Last Payment Date newer than a set date.
 
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  • The payment methods section shows the methods users can use to pay and perform transactions.
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Clicking on a payment method will let you change your email and enable or disable the method.

The payments tab has information about all payments made with information about them.

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Reported auctions are seen in the Reported Reverse Auctions tab. These are auctions users have viewed as inappropriate and have reported. You can see the date they have been reported, a message which describes the reason it was reported, the title, if it is in progress or if it has been solved. You can mark reported auctions as "In Progress" if you are not ready to make a decision about it, but you want to show that you are taking action in resolving the issue.

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You can choose to see only auctions that are Unsolved or In progress by using the filter above the list.

The Statistics page shows the total numbers of active/closed auction, registered/active users, active/accepted bids and a list with every user and their statistics.

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Version information and if any update is available can be found in the About page. You also find link to the developers here.

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To browse auctions on your website you can got o the "Reverse Auctions List" section in the backend. The auctions are displayed in a list with all the important information shown in columns.
You can see the name of the auction and its poster, clicking on the name of the auction will take you to the auction page and clicking on the name will take you to the user details page.


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Each column displays useful information about each auction, bid prices, start/end dates, status, bidders and allows you to ban/unban auctions with only a click. There is also an Auction Manager that allows you to filter auctions when browsing, you can enter a keyword, select the user, browse by status along with a sorting option that sorts them according to start/end date, prices, title, username and hits.


The detailed view of an auction in the backend should look somewhat like this:

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The first action on the auction page is to set it as featured, select the option you want and click on "Set Featured". You can also block and close the auction or send messages from here and view its pictures. The details are displayed on the left and underneath the auction you find the messages , clicking on the right "Messages" text will take you to the actual messages.