Straight answers on licensing, payments, fees, AI features, installation and hosting - everything you need to know before you launch your auction website.
PHP Bid is a self-hosted PHP auction script for building your own online auction website. It includes automatic (proxy) bidding and exact bids, anti-sniping protection, Buy Now and fixed-price listings, Make an Offer, reserve prices, Stripe, PayPal and bank transfer payments, seller commissions and buyer's premium, an AI listing assistant, AI search, 8 professional designs, a complete members area for buyers and sellers, and a full admin panel with CMS, blog and SEO tools.
Hosted auction platforms charge monthly fees and often a percentage of every sale, and you never own the software. WordPress auction plugins depend on other plugins and themes, and get slow and fragile as the site grows. PHP Bid is a standalone, lightweight PHP 8 application built only for auctions: you pay once, install it on your own server, own the unencrypted source code and keep 100% of the fees your site earns.
PHP Bid includes four revenue streams that you switch on and price yourself: a commission on every sale paid by the seller, a buyer's premium paid by the winner, a listing fee per item and a paid featured upgrade for home page placement. On top of that you can sell advertising in the built-in ad zones. All fees are invoiced automatically, with VAT if needed, and paid online. We never take a share of your revenue.
No. PHP Bid is a one-time license. There is no monthly subscription, no transaction fee and no revenue share. The only recurring costs are your own hosting and, if you use them, your payment provider and AI provider fees.
Yes. The live demo includes the auction website, the members area (with demo buyer and seller accounts) and the full admin panel. You can bid, make offers, list items with the AI assistant and change every setting. No sign-up is required.
Bidders choose for every bid. With "Bid this amount" the bid is placed at exactly the amount they type. With "Bid automatically" they set a secret maximum, and the system bids for them one increment at a time, only when someone outbids them and never above their limit - the same proxy bidding used by the biggest marketplaces. Both modes work fairly together in the same auction.
Yes. When a bid arrives in the final minutes, the auction is extended automatically. You choose the window and the extension in the admin panel, for example 2 minutes. This gives every bidder a fair chance to answer and leads to higher final prices.
Yes. Sellers can add a Buy Now price to an auction (available until the first bid), sell at a fixed price only, set a secret reserve price, and accept offers. With Make an Offer, buyers propose a price and sellers accept, decline or counter; accepted offers become normal sales.
Stripe Checkout (cards, and Apple Pay and Google Pay where enabled in your Stripe account), PayPal and bank transfer. Each one can be switched on separately in the admin panel, where you can also test your API keys. Bank transfers show your bank details with a unique reference, and you confirm them with one click. Our team can add other gateways on request.
Yes. You define the VAT rates sellers can choose, whether prices include VAT, and the VAT rate on your own fees. Item pages show "incl. 20% VAT" or "+ VAT", sale totals show the VAT amount, and your listing fees, commissions and buyer's premiums are invoiced with the net amount, the VAT and the total.
Sellers can offer up to 8 shipping methods per item, such as standard, express, international or local pickup, each with its own price. Buyers see all options on the item page and choose one after the sale; the total updates automatically. Sellers add the tracking number when they ship.
The AI listing assistant writes the title and subtitle, picks the category and condition, estimates the value and suggests the starting, reserve and Buy Now prices. The AI description writer creates a professional lot description. AI search turns sentences like "a Rolex under $10,000 ending soon" into filters. The lot assistant answers buyers' questions from the listing. In the admin panel, AI checks listings for risks, translates categories and pages, and writes website pages.
PHP Bid works with Groq, DeepSeek and OpenAI (ChatGPT) using your own API key. You choose the model and switch each AI feature on or off. You pay your AI provider directly, usually just a few cents for hundreds of requests; there is no AI surcharge from us. AI search keeps working with built-in rules even without an API key.
Both. You can run a multi-vendor marketplace where every member can buy and sell, sell only your own items as an auction house, or combine both. You can also approve every new listing before it goes online, and switch off selling for individual members.
Yes. Sellers download a CSV template, fill it in with Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice and import up to 300 items per file, including category fields, VAT, shipping methods and image URLs. The items arrive as drafts so they can be checked and published together.
Yes. Buyers can ask public questions on the item page or send a private message to the seller, and after a sale both parties can message each other about payment and shipping. Conversations stay on your website, and the administrator can read them to solve disputes.
Members can report listings with a reason, and reports arrive in a moderation queue where you remove a listing and notify the seller in one click. A banned-words filter checks listings, questions, messages and offers, and the AI moderation check gives a risk level for any listing. Ratings and feedback after every sale build trust between members.
Yes. PHP Bid includes 8 professional, mobile-friendly templates that you switch with one click, and you can set your logo, favicon, hero image and colors. Each template is a folder with one HTML, one CSS and one JavaScript file, so designers can create their own templates easily.
Yes. English and Spanish are included, you can add more languages, and every interface text can be edited in the admin panel. Pages, categories, category fields and blog articles have their own text in each language, and AI can translate them for you.
Yes. Auctions, categories and pages have SEO-friendly URLs, every page has its own title and description, item pages are unique content for every listing, and pages load fast with automatic thumbnails. You can add Google Analytics, a Facebook Pixel and custom scripts, and publish articles in the built-in blog.
Standard PHP hosting with PHP 8, MySQL or MariaDB and the usual PHP extensions (PDO, cURL, GD, mbstring). Most shared hosting plans, VPS and dedicated servers work. A cron job is optional; PHP Bid also closes auctions and sends reminders on normal page views.
Yes. Our technical team installs and configures PHP Bid on your hosting account for free, and checks that bidding, e-mails and payments work. If we can't get it running on your hosting, you get a full refund under our refund policy.
Yes. Every license includes the complete, unencrypted PHP source code - no encoded files, no license server and no phone-home. You or your developers can customize everything, and the software keeps working on your server forever.
Yes. We built PHP Bid, so we can adapt the design, add payment gateways, auction formats like timed catalogue sales, or the fields and rules your niche needs - car auctions, charity auctions, B2B surplus and more. In many cases we prepare a demo before you decide.