Ubercart Auction

Garrett Albright - September 25, 2008 - 22:30

This module allows you to auction off products in your Ubercart store. When a product is put up for auction, users can no longer add the item to their cart, but they may place bids on it until the auction expires. The user that placed the highest bid on the product will then be able to add it to their cart and purchase it at the price they bid.

This module requires Ubercart 2, which is currently in beta; Ubercart Auction itself is not quite at release quality. Also, fair warning: Now that our client's site is live and this module does everything they need it to do and more, this module is only lightly supported/updated since I'm not working on it at work anymore and it's a low priority as a personal project. In other words, if you're itching for new features or bug fixes, be prepared to implement them yourself - or crack open your wallet and make with the financial incentive. Sorry, but them's the facts.

Features:

Works with any product or service you can sell through Ubercart, either with core UC modules or contributed ones^*
Works with any currency^*
Minimum bid increase, maximum bid increase and bid interval limits which can be set at both the global and the per-product level
Snazzy JavaScript-powered countdown timer to auction expiry and client-side valid bid checking
Optional email notifications to users when they have won auctions or have been outbid
Per-item bid history lists with easy deletion of errant bids
Basic (and occasionally buggy) Views integration
Basic API for writing modules to integrate with Ubercart Auction
Optional submodules to enable "Buy Now" functionality and basic anti-sniping features

*: Theoretically… please test if you can.

Things UC Auction can't and probably will never do, so please stop asking, but feel free to implement it as a third-party module if you so wish:

Dutch auctions in the traditional sense, where the price of an item decreases until someone purchases it
Multiple item auctions, or Dutch auctions in eBay's stupid "why did they take an established term and apply their own incorrect definition to it" sense, in which X products are for sale in a single auction and the top X bidders all win when it expires
Allowing users to sell to each other - like the rest of Ubercart, UC Auction assumes that site owners are creating items to be auctioned to visitors; a clear one-way transaction
Reverse auctions or quote bidding, where the initial party requests a quote price for a product or service and potential providers attempt to underbid each other on a quote for that product/service
Proxy or automatic bidding, in which the price you bid is only the maximum price you wish to pay for the product, and bids will be automatically placed on your behalf by the system until either the auction ends or the maximum price is reached - in UC Auction, the price you bid is the price you bid
Reserve prices (they're evil!)
Drupal 5/Ubercart 1 support - It's time to upgrade, seriously

Ubercart Auction is sponsored by Precision Intermedia. "Imagine no limits."