An auction is a pricing mechanism that Shopify does not have. There is no auction object in the admin, no bid record on a product, and no way for a customer to commit to a price the store has not published. The closest native workflow is manual: you watch offers arrive by email, decide who won, and build a draft order with a custom price.

That is fine for one painting a quarter. It is not a business. So the entire category lives in apps, and Shopify's own App Store taxonomy says so — auction functionality appears as feature filters (Auctions, Bidding) under Pricing quotes and Pricing optimization, not as a Shopify capability.

Research date: September 2, 2026. All prices are USD, taken from the English (?locale=en) App Store listings.

The short version

Seven auction apps, seven pricing pages, and no two of them are counting the same thing. "Unlimited auctions" on one listing and "unlimited auctions" on another describe different products.

• Bidly: Auction and Bidding App and Webkul Product Auction meter concurrent auctions — how many can be live at the same moment.
• Auction Today, Bid Online Auction, and Auction Pro meter auction count, with no stated time window.
• Treo · Auction Plus meters auction listings per month, plus a second meter for offer actions.
• Auction Now has no monthly fee and takes 5% when an auction sells with a bid.

The percentage model looks free and stops being cheap fast. Auction Today's Advanced plan is $15/month for unlimited auctions. Five percent of $300 is $15. Above roughly $300 of auction sales per month, Auction Now is the more expensive option — and that threshold is a couple of mid-priced collectibles.

The feature that actually decides your operations is not bidding. It is what happens when the winner disappears.

What Shopify gives you: nothing, and that is the point

There is no partial native path here, which makes this category unusually clean to evaluate. Shopify does not model a bid, does not hold a lot open until a timer expires, and has no concept of a winning bidder who owes you money. Everything an auction needs — the timer, the bid ledger, the anti-sniping extension, the winner-to-checkout handoff — is app-side state.

Two consequences follow, and both matter more than any feature checklist.

First, auction data is not portable. Bid history lives in the app's database, not in your Shopify orders. If you uninstall, you keep the orders that closed and lose the auctions that had not.

Second, theme surface area varies a lot. Reading the Data access sections of the listings: Webkul Product Auction requests edit access to Online Store script tags, theme, and Online Store pages on a path controlled by the app; Auction Pro requests only view access to the theme. That difference is invisible while the app is installed and very visible after you remove it.

Meter one: what a "plan limit" counts

Here is the same store — 20 lots running simultaneously, refreshed weekly, so roughly 80 lots a month — priced against each app's published tiers.

App	What the plan meters	Entry paid tier	Cheapest tier that fits 20 concurrent / ~80 monthly lots
Bidly: Auction and Bidding App	Active auctions at once	$9.99/month (3 active)	$19.99/month Pro (20 active)
Webkul Product Auction	Live running auctions at a time	$15/month (unlimited auctions)	$15/month Starter, but see the caveat below
Auction Today	Auction count	$9/month (15 auctions)	$15/month Advanced (unlimited)
Bid Online Auction	Auction count	$7.90/month (15 auctions)	$14.90/month PRO+ (unlimited)
Auction Pro	Auction count	$15/month (100 auctions)	$15/month Basic
Treo · Auction Plus	Auction listings per month	$19/month (100 listings/month)	$19/month Basic
Auction Now	Nothing — 5% success fee	Free to install	5% of every sale that closes with a bid

All figures from each app's Shopify App Store listing, US locale, retrieved September 2, 2026.

The Webkul caveat is worth naming because it is the kind of thing that produces a surprise after install. The Free plan states Live Running Auction Limit At-a-time: 1. The $15 Starter plan states Unlimited Auctions but does not restate an at-a-time figure. The at-a-time number reappears at $30 Growth as Live Running Auction Limit At-a-time:500. Whether Starter's concurrency is unlimited or inherits a lower cap is not stated on the listing, and I could not confirm it from Webkul's public documentation. If you are running many simultaneous lots, ask before you commit.

Meter two: percentage pricing has a crossover point

Auction Now is the only app here with no subscription. Free to install, 5% charged when an auction sells with a bid. For a store testing one lot a month, that is unambiguously the right shape — you pay nothing to find out whether your customers bid at all.

The arithmetic changes quickly:

Monthly auction sales	Auction Now at 5%	Auction Today Advanced	Treo · Auction Plus Grow
$300	$15	$15	$49
$2,000	$100	$15	$49
$10,000	$500	$15	$49
$50,000	$2,500	$15	$49

At $50,000 of monthly hammer value, the difference between the percentage model and a flat $15 plan is about $29,800 a year. That does not make Auction Now a bad app — it is Built for Shopify, it lists second-chance winner selection on the free tier, and its incentives are aligned with yours in a way a flat fee never is. It makes the percentage model a starter shape, and one you should be actively watching, not a permanent one.

The question that actually matters: the winner does not pay

In a fixed-price store, an abandoned checkout is a lost sale. In an auction, a non-paying winner is worse: the lot was held, the underbidders were told they lost, and the item is now unsold with a stale bid history attached.

Shopify has no mechanism for this, so each app invents one, and the tier where automation appears is where the real price difference lives.

App	How non-payment is handled	Tier where it appears
Auction Now	Auto select the next bidder as the winner if current winner doesn't pay	Free to install (5% fee)
Webkul Product Auction	Winner expiration window, Auto Winner Declaration	$15/month Starter
Webkul Product Auction	Auto-Charge Winner	$30/month Growth
Treo · Auction Plus	Automatic payment reminders	$19/month Basic
Auction Today	Auto declare winner	$15/month Advanced
Bid Online Auction	Manual Winner Selection	$7.90/month PRO

Feature names quoted verbatim from each app's Shopify App Store pricing tiers, retrieved September 2, 2026.

Three distinct philosophies are visible here.

Charge the card automatically. Webkul Product Auction is the only listing in this set that names auto-charging the winner, and it costs $30/month. If you run high-volume, low-value lots and cannot chase invoices, this is the specific feature you are buying, and it sits two tiers above the free plan.

Reassign the lot. Auction Now's second-chance behavior — promote the next bidder if the winner does not pay — is the auction-house convention, and it is the only such feature I found on a plan with no monthly fee.

Nudge and wait. Treo's automatic payment reminders and Webkul's winner expiration window both assume a human closes the loop. That is fine for art and collectibles where a five-figure lot justifies a phone call, and poor for a store closing 200 lots a week.

Bid Online Auction's Manual Winner Selection is honest about what it is. At $7.90/month it is the cheapest entry into the category, and you are the automation.

Buyer's premium exists on exactly one listing

Every real auction house charges a buyer's premium — a percentage added to the hammer price that funds the operation. Of the seven listings, Treo · Auction Plus is the only one that names Buyer's premium & product fees, and it is on the $49/month Grow plan, not the $19 Basic.

If your business model assumes a premium, this single line collapses the comparison: you are choosing between Treo at $49/month and building the fee into your reserve prices everywhere else.

The apps

Auction Today — the volume default

Source: Shopify App Store (Auction Today), retrieved September 2, 2026

Auction Today, by Apex Apps, launched August 10, 2022 and holds 4.9 across 305 reviews — the largest review base in this comparison by a wide margin. Four tiers: Free (1 auction, and notably including proxy bidding, popcorn bidding, reserve and buyout prices, and multi-currency), Starter $9/month (15 auctions, bulk auction creation, a dedicated auction collection), Advanced $15/month (unlimited auctions, auto declare winner, email notifications, integrations), Enterprise $40/month (approved bidders, CSV import, API, custom email templates).

The unusual thing is how much sits in the free tier. Reserve prices, buyout, proxy bidding, and penny auctions are all there at $0 — you just cannot run a second lot. That makes it the cheapest honest way to test whether your catalog auctions well.

The integrations list is also the broadest here: Klaviyo, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Mailgun, SendGrid, and Wiser, plus Customer accounts. For a US store already running Klaviyo flows, outbid and winner notifications landing in the same system as everything else is a real operational saving.

Poor fit: stores that need bidder vetting before the auction opens. Approved Bidders is Enterprise-only at $40/month.

Webkul Product Auction — the deepest feature set, and the largest theme footprint

Source: Shopify App Store (Webkul Product Auction), retrieved September 2, 2026

Webkul Software Pvt Ltd has been shipping this since May 12, 2016 — by nine years the oldest app in the set — and it shows in the feature list: proxy bidding, popcorn bidding, penny auctions, joining fees, bidder banning, CSV bulk upload, WhatsApp and SMS alerts via Twilio, and an Auction API at $40/month Pro.

The rating deserves reading properly. 4.7 across 165 reviews, but the distribution is 84% five-star and 10% one-star — 17 one-star reviews. That is a bimodal shape, not a mediocre average, and it is common in apps with deep configuration surfaces. Recent reviews on the listing are positive and repeatedly cite support responsiveness; one merchant in Singapore reports almost three years of use.

The Joining Fee feature at $15 Starter is the anti-fraud lever nobody else lists: charge bidders to enter, and non-serious bidders self-select out. Combined with Ban Bidders on the free plan, this is the most complete answer to bad-faith bidding in the category.

Poor fit: stores that are cautious about theme modifications. The Data access section lists edit permissions for Online Store script tags, theme, and app-controlled pages — the widest surface in this comparison.

Treo · Auction Plus — Built for Shopify, and the only one with buyer's premium

Source: Shopify App Store (Treo · Auction Plus), retrieved September 2, 2026

Treo, based in Oklahoma City, launched Auction Plus on December 13, 2023. It carries the Built for Shopify badge, holds 5.0 across 31 reviews, works with Checkout and Klaviyo, and states North American live chat and email support — the only listing in this set that specifies a support region, which matters if your auctions close at 9pm Eastern.

Its free plan is the most generous in the category by an order of magnitude: 50 auctions per month at $0, versus one auction on every other free plan. What the free tier withholds is the operational layer — outbid notifications, watchlists, soft close, and payment reminders all start at $19 Basic.

Auction Plus also carries a second product inside it: Make an Offer, a chat-style negotiation flow, metered separately as "offer actions." If you want both auctions and offer-based selling, this is the only app here that does both, and you should read the two meters as two products sharing one bill.

Poor fit: high-volume stores. The top published tier is 1,000 auction listings per month at $99, so a store closing more than about 33 lots a day has run out of listing.

Auction Now — no subscription, aligned incentives, watch the crossover

Source: Shopify App Store (Auction Now), retrieved September 2, 2026

Raremarq, based in San Rafael, California, launched Auction Now on August 14, 2025. It is Built for Shopify, rated 4.7 across 12 reviews, and sold on a single plan: free to install, 5% success fee when an auction sells with a bid.

The feature set on that single plan is not thin — Soft Close anti-sniping, branded email alerts to bidders and watchers, automatic combined shipping, max bids for proxy bidding, multi-currency, batch auction creation, and second-chance winner selection. For a store with fewer than roughly 10 lots a month, this is the lowest-risk entry point in the category, because a month with no sales costs nothing.

The Auto Combined Shipping feature is worth pausing on: a bidder who wins four lots in one session should pay one shipping charge, and combining them is fiddly to do by hand. No other listing in this set names it.

Poor fit: anything at scale. Run the crossover math above before you commit.

Auction Pro — no free plan, flat and simple

Source: Shopify App Store (Auction Pro), retrieved September 2, 2026

EngineLaser, in Toronto, launched Auction Pro on January 11, 2022. 4.9 across 17 reviews. Two tiers, $15/month for 100 auctions and $25/month for unlimited, each with a 14-day free trial — the longest trial in this comparison, and the only meaningful compensation for having no free plan.

The listing names reverse auctions and bidding fees / penny auctions, and its Data access is the narrowest here: view-only theme access, products, orders, and locations. If you want auctions without an app writing into your theme, this is the shortest permission list on offer.

Poor fit: stores that want to try before paying. There is no free plan, only the trial.

Bidly and Bid Online Auction — the two ends of the newcomer bracket

Source: Shopify App Store (Bidly: Auction and Bidding App), retrieved September 2, 2026

Bidly, by Human Intelligence Studio Limited, launched February 19, 2026 and has no reviews at all as of this writing. Its tiers are the clearest statement of the concurrency model in the category: 1 active auction free, 3 at $9.99, 20 at $19.99, unlimited at $49.99. It is also the only listing that gates a per-auction live chat box behind its top tier, and the only one that puts popcorn bidding at $19.99 rather than on the free plan.

A zero-review app is not a disqualification, but it is a fact you should price in. There is no evidence yet about how it behaves in the last thirty seconds of a contested lot, which is the only moment an auction app has to get right.

Source: Shopify App Store (Bid Online Auction), retrieved September 2, 2026

Bid Online Auction, by Systenics Solutions LLP, is rated 4.4 across 5 reviews and is the cheapest paid entry in the set: $7.90/month for 15 auctions, $14.90/month for unlimited, with 20% annual discounts on both. It supports 28 interface languages, more than any other app here. Winner selection is manual, email notifications start at PRO, and there is no auto-charge or second-chance behavior on the listing.

Two apps left the category this year

Seamlessly Auction by Seamlessly Apps and Hobuy: Instant Auctions Hub by Modern e-Commerce Technologies LLC both return "This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store" as of September 2, 2026, despite still ranking in search results and appearing in third-party roundups.

That is worth more than a footnote. An auction app holds live bid state that has no home in Shopify. When one is delisted, a store mid-auction has no native fallback — the lots simply stop being lots. Before you install, check the launch date and the review recency on the listing itself, not the roundup that sent you there.

How to choose

• Testing whether your catalog auctions at all: Auction Now, if your monthly auction sales will stay under roughly $300. Otherwise Auction Today's free plan, which gives you reserve, buyout, and proxy bidding on one lot at $0.
• Steady volume, flat cost: Auction Today Advanced at $15/month for unlimited auctions, or Bid Online Auction PRO+ at $14.90/month if you are willing to select winners by hand.
• Non-paying winners are your main operational cost: Webkul Product Auction Growth at $30/month for Auto-Charge Winner. Nothing else in this set names automatic charging.
• You charge a buyer's premium: Treo · Auction Plus Grow at $49/month. It is the only listing that names the feature.
• Bidder vetting before the lot opens: Auction Today Enterprise at $40/month (Approved Bidders) or Treo Grow at $49/month (Bidder registration fields). Webkul's Joining Fee at $15 Starter is a cheaper economic filter, though a different mechanism.
• Minimum permissions: Auction Pro, which requests view-only theme access.
• Many simultaneous lots: confirm the concurrency figure in writing before you pay. This is where the listings are least precise.

What is not stated on the listings

Three things I could not verify from primary sources, and which you should ask each vendor directly:

Whether the concurrency cap follows the auction cap. Webkul's Starter tier says unlimited auctions without restating an at-a-time limit. Auction Today, Auction Pro, and Bid Online Auction say "auctions" without defining a window at all — whether that is a lifetime count, a monthly count, or a concurrent count is not on the listings.

What happens to open lots at uninstall. No listing in this set states it.

Whether auction sales are excluded from Shop Pay or any accelerated checkout. Only Treo · Auction Plus names Checkout in its "Works with" list. The others do not say either way, and not stated in the app's official documentation is different from unsupported.

Sources

• Auction Today — Shopify App Store
• Webkul Product Auction — Shopify App Store
• Treo · Auction Plus — Shopify App Store
• Auction Now — Shopify App Store
• Auction Pro — Shopify App Store
• Bidly: Auction and Bidding App — Shopify App Store
• Bid Online Auction — Shopify App Store
• Pricing quotes category — Shopify App Store