Thank you for your reply.. your reply very quickly made up my mind NOT to do it.. the Auction is enough I don't need other variables. Thank you for your great input.
I so believe it would be an awful lot of work. You would have to have computers set up at the auction with people ready to enter bids up until the last second. A quick lesson on ebay: when you put a item up for auction on ebay, you are agreeing to sell that item to the highest bidder on ebay. You are entering into a contract with ebay as the middleman(who also gets a cut, don't forget). If you were to say, get a higher bid from a parent at the last second, and that bid is entered too late for the ebay system to register it, you must sell the item to the ebay bidder, as that bidder is now legally in contract with you. I don't know if this makes any sense, but I've been selling on ebay for a couple of years now and I don't see how this could possibly work.
I think you'd have to chose either a silent auction or ebay...not both. Did the auctioneer tell you if he'd actually ever done this? And if so, how?
Don't forget that ebay charges you to list an item, and then takes a % of the highest bid. Then you have to package and ship everything once you get payment. It's alot of work, believe me. I think you're better off with one night silent auction at the school with local participation.
In speaking with a local auctioneer he mentioned having silent auction items on ebay concurrently with the auction to help drive the bids up. This sound like an awful lot of work and was wondering if anyone had ever done this? -and would you do it again??
