LiveAuctioneers: Bid @ Auction

Live Auctioneers has a very broad following from local auction houses all over the country. You are very likely to find something of interest through this organization. The app is really good for browsing auctions and looking for items of interest. However, the app is horrible when it comes to actually keeping up with a live auction. It has a really hard time staying active and notifications seem sporadic. If you have the time, you could just sit through an entire auction, but they usually last all day. This may not be a problem if you are retired but its otherwise frustrating. If you really care about the auction, you will save yourself a lot of stress by using the website on a desktop or laptop instead of this app on your phone. Keep a tab open and check back that way. Considering this is the granddaddy of live auction websites, the app is pretty disappointing.

Excellent site except two big problems: if using your cell phone, the data speeds up or slows down depending on the cell tower being used for your call which means if you attempt to hit the ‘bid’ button with one bid amount being shown that the bid price can suddenly spike so that when you finish pressing said bid button you might very well be pressing the button for a bid you didn’t intend making - this happened to me where the intended $55 bid I was making suddenly spiked to $1050 as I pressed the bid button probably because the data transmission from the cell tower suddenly spiked. I immediately and frantically e-mailed this incident to the auctioneer web site. So that’s one issue. The second is that the auctioneer web site states the retract bid button is on the lower right of the web page during bidding. It is not. In fact no button is there that identifies itself as the stop bid button. As it turns out this ‘button’ is on the upper right edge as is represented as a vertical three dot sign. As least that’s how it appears on my iPhone screen. These issues need fixing. Other than that a great site.

The improvements to the app made in early 2019 are a huge improvement. The live bidding experience is richer (e.g. swipe photos, see item info while bidding) and you can now save searches in the mobile app (before you could only modify saved searches on the website). Many other thoughtful improvements, and I will note the competitors e.g. Invaluable have failed to keep up while others like Bidsquare still don’t even have an app (in 2019!). The folks at LiveAuctioneers are ahead of the pack and the latest updates demonstrate their commitment to investing in improving the app and making it easier to use and more powerful. Thank you.