Auction Settings - Silent Auctions
What is a Silent Auction?
Silent auctions as the name suggests are silent in nature. Conventionally, during a normal auction event, people shout their bids, and one who has the highest bid wins. On the contrary, in the silent auction, all members write their bids on a sheet of paper and submit them to the auctioneer. None of them are aware of anyone's bid amount. When the auction ends, the highest-listed bidder wins the auction.
To simulate similar behavior in our plugin, it needed to do below:
- Users can bid on any amount. In other types of bidding each user can bid an amount exact or more than the incremental price. Thus, there isn't any concept of proxy bidding when the silent auction setting is enabled.
- Users cannot see other bid amounts.
- The highest bidder will win in the end.
Please review the below video for creating an auction product under silent bidding. This video will cover how to enable the silent bidding option from the auction setting, Create a silent auction product, the bid workflow with the silent auction and hide the bidder's name from the other users.
Plugin Settings
As an admin navigates to Auctions → Settings and selects The Auction tab as given in the below image.
Scroll down and you will find the Silent Auctions Settings section.
Silent Auction Settings:
- Enable Silent Bidding: A Silent-bid auction is a type of auction process in which all bidders simultaneously submit Silent bids to the auctioneer so that no bidder knows how much the other auction participants have bid. The highest bidder is usually declared the winner of the bidding process. Enable the Silent Bidding option and save the changes.
Admin has enabled both proxy bidding and silent bidding. What this means is that Admin has given an option to all auctioneer while adding their auctions, they can choose whether they want to run a proxy or silent auction. See the below image which shows that the auctioneer will get to choose one out of these two options.
If Admin checks "Enable Silent-Bid" then automatically "Enable Proxy Bidding" will vanish. See the below image for that.
Once the auction is added, you will notice below things pertaining to the Silent auction inside Auction Detail Page. 
- Mask Username:
if you enable Mask Username for silent bidding then the username will add ****** and not display full Username public. The user will be able to only see his bid upon login and cannot see this information for other users. The only exception is admin.
Admin sees all information:
Tester A only sees his information but not any of the bid amounts:
- Mask Bid Amount:
if you enable Mask Bid Amount for silent bidding then the Bid amount will add ****** and not display the amount to the public. The user will be able to only see his bid upon login and cannot see any amount. The only exception is admin.
- Restrict users to bid only one time:
The Silent auctions accept a single bid from each user. You can check this field to allow a single bid for each user and if the existing user again tries to place a bid again then he/she will get a message like below.
- Do you want to send the outbid notification:
Enable the outbid notification and an email is sent to the Bidder to outbid their bid without Bid value.
- Show Current Bid Value In outbid mail:
Enable the show current bid value in outbid mail to show Bid value in outbid email.
