Renewed interest in CiviAuction?

[BrightBold]

I'm wondering if there's any more interest than there was a few years ago in CiviAuction (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviAuction+Requirements and https://civicrm.org/blogs/lobo/civiauction-offline-auction-management-system), which it sounds like was abandoned in 2009 due to lack of interest. I'm interested in figuring out what would be involved in resurrecting this and whether there's sufficient community interest.

Our organization has a silent auction, so we're interested in:

• the ability to enter the auction items as donations in CiviCRM,
• grouping one or more items together into an auction package,
• having the ability for an individual to make a contribution that equates to "buying" that auction package, with a receipt that reflects that the tax-deductible portion is the difference between their donation amount and the total value of items making up the package.
• the ability for an individual to check out at the end of the evening and pay for what might be several items at once -- maybe they had the winning bid for two auction packages, plus they bought some raffle tickets and made a donation

I can (and already have) do #1 easily by setting up an in-kind financial type in CiviCRM. #2 I can do in Drupal with references, for the purposes of creating a page listing all the auction packages. But it's #3 and #4 that have me stumped.

I've searched for evidence of other organizations using CiviCRM for auctions and have found surprisingly little. Is there any interest? What would be involved? Roughly how much for a Make It Happen? Or are there other developers in the community who might be interested in collaborating on this? Or are there people who have built solutions they'd be willing to share?

I'm interested, so if you are too, let me know.

[koensayr]

I'd be hugely interested if any efforts have been make. I'm finding that more and more, Non-Profits use large charity auctions at fundraising events. This would be a wonderful area for Civi to expand into.

[Roberta]

We'd also be incredibly interested in this feature. We started looking at outside providers for this but none of them seems to meet our needs. Plus having it integrated in the CRM would be incredibly useful!

[JoeMurray]

I see there is code in the core CiviCRM repository to do something to support CiviAuction: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/tree/master/tools/CRM/Auction. I'd love to see some better documentation linked to from this thread.

[coopersquare]

We use CiviCRM for our back-end Auction handling, as well as a rudimentary payment for items (via Contribution Page). It is greatly helpful to have it all live in CiviCRM so that Constituents' activity is all together.

However, we are looking into https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=auction and http://www.capterra.com/auction-software/spotlight/141890/Sumac/Sumac to try to get a more appealing interface for the user.

Still looking into these options.

[PhilMorBru]

Our organization has a silent auction every year, and having Civi integration would be a big help:

• Listing items - with thumbnail, short description, link, value, etc. on the website
• Individual item views on the website, with more details
• Ability to record who purchased the item, and send them a receipt
• Tracking who donated the item, which might mean several contacts for a single item (such as a weekend getaway package with donations from a hotel, restaurant, and venues

We might be willing to contribute to this project.