The challenge
A traditional auction is limited by its room. Only people who can attend on the day get to bid, and every serious collector who lives too far away is a bid that never happens. For a seller, fewer bidders usually means less competition for each lot.
This art auction house in India wanted collectors elsewhere in the country and abroad to take part while a sale was running, not afterwards and not through a slow relay by phone. They needed a live auction app that let remote buyers study the lots, follow the bidding and place bids of their own.
Two further problems came with that. Remote buyers think in their own money, and converting prices in your head while the bidding moves is a reason to sit out. And an auction house has to trust that every bidder it cannot see is a real, reachable person.
What we built: an online art auction platform for web and mobile
We built the auction house's bidding platform as an Angular website and native Android and iOS apps, with Node.js, Express.js and MongoDB behind them. Buyers can move between a laptop and a phone during the same sale.
Real-time bidding. Remote bidders see the auction move and bid while the lot is still open.
An auction calendar. Live, upcoming and past auctions sit in one view, and past lots show their hammer price.
Filters and artist pages. Buyers narrow lots by artist, category, price range and size.
Two currencies. Bids default to rupees, and international buyers can bid in US dollars.
Verified bidders. A one-time code to the buyer's email and mobile number has to be confirmed before the first bid.
Alerts. Push and email messages go out when an auction opens, a bid changes or bidding closes.
Shared links open the exact auction inside the app, so a collector who taps one lands on the right sale, not the home screen. Behind it all, staff use a back office to set up auctions and lots, manage artists, record winners and place bids on a buyer's behalf when asked.
How it works day to day
Take a collector overseas who follows a handful of modern painters. A push alert says an auction has opened. She filters the catalog by artist and size, checks the hammer prices of similar past lots, and decides her limit in US dollars.
Because she verified her email and mobile when she registered, she can bid straight away. When someone outbids her, an alert reaches her phone in time to answer. When bidding closes, she gets a final message either way.
In the auction house, staff watch the same sale from the back office. When a buyer cannot bid for themselves, staff can place the bid on their behalf. Winners are recorded against each lot as the sale closes.
The result
Registered buyers now bid live from wherever they are, so the auction is no longer limited to the people in the room. Distance stopped being a reason for a serious collector to sit out.
The house manages its catalog, artists and results in one place. Every remote bid comes from a buyer whose email and mobile number are confirmed, and buyers abroad can bid in a currency they know.
What the research says
Art buyers already buy online. In a 2023 report by art insurer Hiscox, 44% of art buyers said they had bought online from traditional galleries and auction houses in the past 12 months, up from 35% the year before. An auction house without online bidding leaves those buyers out.
Online bidders can come from anywhere. At Copart, a large online vehicle auction company, 38.8% of the US vehicles it sold in fiscal 2025 went to international members, judged by the IP address they bid from (annual report). Bidding on the web and in apps, in rupees or dollars, opens this auction house to the same kind of reach.
A second check stops account takeovers. A 2023 study of Microsoft Azure Active Directory accounts found that multifactor authentication cut the risk of compromise by 99.22%, and by 98.56% where the password had already leaked (Meyer et al., arXiv). Confirming every bidder with one-time codes to both email and phone puts the same idea in front of the bid button.
Where AI fits next
These are possibilities, not features in use today. A model could draft lot descriptions from an artwork's details for a specialist to edit before the catalog goes live. It could also suggest upcoming lots to buyers based on the artists they follow and have bid on.
Planning something similar?
Before you take your auctions online, settle these points:
Who may bid: existing clients only, or new buyers who register and are verified first?
Where they bid: in a browser, in apps or both? Many buyers switch during one sale.
Which currencies you show, and which one the sale is settled in.
How bids from the room, the phone and the apps combine into one live price.
See how we approach web application development and mobile app development, compare native and cross-platform apps, or read more about our ecommerce software work.
