What is automatic bidding exactly? Well, you simply enter the highest price you’re willing to pay for an item, and we’ll do the rest.
Once you set up automatic bidding, you can stay ahead of the competition for an item without needing to be on the site to bid yourself.
To set up automatic bidding on an auction product, the user will enter the maximum amount he likes to pay for that item and places a bid. The plugin will bid in increments on behalf of the user, to keep him in the lead but only up to the limit they gave in.
The plugin also sends an email to the user, if someone outbids their max amount, so they can decide to increase the maximum limit again.
How to set up bid increments with the plugin?
When another user places a bid, the plugin will place a slightly higher bid on behalf of the user. The amount the bid increases by is known as a bid increment.
Step 1. Choose the bid type within the product editing page
We can choose either the ‘simple’ increment or the ‘advanced’ increment. With the simple increment we only have to add 1 amount (10€), that will be used regardless of the current bid.
In this example we will choose the advanced option however.
Step 2. Setting the advanced increment rules
Generally, bid increments are smaller when the bid price is low and larger in higher price brackets, so we will follow this example.
| Current price | Bid increment |
| 0,01 to 4,99 | +0,10 |
| 5,00 to 24,99 | +0,50 |
| 25,00 to 99,99 | +1,00 |
| 100 and up | +2,50 |
Step 3. How does the automatic bid up work?
Suppose we set a 10€ automatic bid up for the product and the auction base price is 50€ like we have set in step 1.
Jane places a bid of 100€. It is the first bid and we have set an automatic bid up value, the system will record the bid in the amount of the product base price rather than the 100€ the Jane put in.
Now another user, Carlos, places a bid of 60€.
The system records the new bid and checks the available conditions to apply an automatic bid up for those users who previously made a bid for the auction.
In our example, we have a recorded bid of 50€ made by Jane. Actually the user initially bade 100€, therefore the system can automatically apply a new bid for her.
The new ‘automatic’ bid will be 70€. This value is given by the 10€ automatic bid up applied to the highest recorded bid (60€).