The first month of Auction IT is behind us. As the ancient proverb goes, “to auction servers and to auction server components, you’ll go through both good and bad moments.” Thankfully, there were more of the good. It started bumpy (more on that below), but mostly it’s been a great ride, and we’re really happy with how you received the platform. Here's what we learned.
Lesson one: there’s real demand for server auctions
Our weekly visitors have more than doubled since launch to almost 3000 a week, and we now see well over a thousand bids a week. Nearly every lot we put up finds a new owner.
Many of you are homelabbers and hobbyists, exactly the people we had in mind when we built Auction IT. Welcome, fellow nerds. Let’s see what you build with it. Plenty of businesses found us too, and they’re just as welcome.
A lot of you found us through Reddit, the natural habitat of homelabbers. Our marketing team went for an “Alice in Wonderland, but make it auctioned servers” theme, and judging by the clicks, you liked it.
We’re based in Rotterdam, but our visitors come from all over the EU: Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, France, Poland, Denmark and more. We also get a lot of visitors from the US, and even some from Australia and China. Sorry, we only ship within the EU for now.
Lesson two: everyone waits until the end
About a quarter of all bids come in during the last 24 hours of component auctions, and around 7% in the final hour. That’s why we use popcorn bidding: a bid in the final minute extends the auction by one minute, so it only ends when the bidding actually stops. Sniping doesn’t win here. The highest bid does. There's no real popcorn involved.
Lesson three: GPUs are hot (and so are drives)
GPU auctions draw the most bids and the highest prices. Our record so far: an RTX 4090 that went for €1,820. Our guess is a lot of you are running local LLMs.
HDD auctions come second, and SSD auctions a close third. All that data has to live somewhere.
Lesson four: not everything is in our hands
Picture launch day, September 15. The photos are shiny, all used servers and components are tested, the stock is ready, the cake is waiting. And then Shopify, the platform we run on, has an outage and its admin goes down for hours that morning. We got through it, and the first auction started at 17:00 as planned.
Not everything went smoothly after, either. In our second week, some winners couldn’t complete checkout. We found the cause and fixed it. Thanks to everyone who stuck with us.
What we improved this month
You told us what worked and what didn’t. So we’ve been busy:
- More ways to pay. Next to cards, iDEAL | Wero, Bancontact and Klarna, you can now pay with PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay, Maestro, Satispay, MB WAY, MobilePay and bank transfer.
- A simpler menu. All running auctions now live on one Auctions page, sorted by what closes first, plus an Upcoming page for what’s next.
- Better categories. Some PSUs, SSDs and other lots weren’t showing up in their category. They are now.
- Favorites. Mark a lot to follow it and get a reminder before it ends.
- Clearer prices. Every lot shows the price incl. VAT under the current bid, and shipping costs load right on the lot page.
- More auctions. We’ve doubled the number of hardware auctions we run each day and will keep increasing them coming weeks.
What’s next
More stock is on its way, including a large batch of auctioned servers, motherboards and PSUs, plus new features. Check out the running auctions or sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss a lot.
