Quickstart

In this guide we’ll look at how to use Rankbid to create your first auction and start generating revenue. This guide doesn’t require coding experience.

Before you can create auctions, you will need setup your company details in your dashboard settings. Rankbid partners with Stripe for processing payments securely on your behalf. All sensitive information is stored securely on Stripe.

Creating your first auction

To create your first auction, go to your dashboard and click on the Add a new auction button. You will be asked to choose your auction type, set the auction duration, and add a title. The auction title wil be displayed to bidders so make sure it is descriptive and can be easily understood.

Auction types

Rankbid offers two types of auctions:

Asynchronous auctions: Bidders can place bids at any time during the auction period. The bidding period is open for a set duration. The highest bid at the end of the bidding period wins. You will be notified of the winning bid by mail or by webhook depending on your settings.
Repeated auctions: These auctions are repeated at a set interval. You can set the auction duration and the interval at which the auction is repeated. The bidding process is similar to asynchronous auctions.

Bidding period

The bidding period is the time during which bidders can place bids. By default, Rankbid auctions only accept credit card payments. Visa and Mastercards impose that the period between payment authorization and payment capture is at most 7 days. We thus currently only support bidding durations of at most 7 days. If you need a longer bidding period, please contact us so that we can adapt to your needs with our Enterprise plan.

The bidding period needs to be at least 1 hour long. This is to ensure that bidders have enough time to place their bids.

Minimum bid

You can set a minimum bid amount for your auction. This is the lowest amount that a bidder can place as a bid in US dollars.

The bidding amount always include payment processing fees. As a result, if you accept very low bids, you might end up paying more in processing fees than the bid amount. In particular, US credit cards payment processing fees are 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. We therefore recommend always setting a minimum bid amount.

Learn more about Rankbid fees

After you fill in the auction details, your auction should become visible on your dashboard. If you cannot see it, please check your filters. You can share your auction with your audience by sharing the auction link. To get the auction link, click on View auction and then copy the URL displayed in the "Integration" section of the auction settings page.

Bidder identification

By default, when a bidder places a bid, they will be asked to enter their email address. We will use this email address to identify the bidder. If the bidder wins the auction, we will communicate their email address to you.

If you know in advance the email address of the bidder, you can pre-fill the bidder email address in the auction link by appending it to the URL as a query parameter. For example, if the original auction link is https://www.rankbid.io/auctions/568628e7-43ea, you can pre-fill the bidder email address by appending ?bidderId=bidder@example.com to the URL if the bidder email is bidder@example.com: https://www.rankbid.io/auctions/568628e7-43ea?bidderId=bidder@example.com.