looking for easy plug-in to do "silent auction" online for our event

The suggestion was made that we put some of our silent auction items up online before the event to help generate interest and additional "shoppers".  We're looking for some sort of plug-in that we might be able to use to do this that would be easy, adaptable and hopefully inexpensive.  Would appreciate any thoughts.

Why not just put the items on Ebay and refer people there in your advertisements? As long as the items are "shippable" or you put "local pickup only" in the auction listing you will have the ultimate exposure at a price that you can't beat.

Nice idea, Tim. I didn't even think about eBay when I read the post. I've actually seen a bunch of charity auctions that used eBay (now that I think about it)

eBay actually offers services specifically for nonprofits.

Dear SRazbadouski,

I agree with Tim's suggestion of using eBay or a similar online auction service that's already set up for this.  Does that fit with your thinking about a "plug-in"? 

Also, you need to think about whether the online silent auction items are being sold just online, just offline, or both.  I looked into this for a charity event I was helping with and we concluded that allowing people to bid on- and offline for the same items wasn't practical.  It could be done if the live auction bidders had some way of bidding online (e.g., mobile phone apps), but we couldn't require that as a prerequisite.  Otherwise, someone would need to be constantly keeping the online and offline bid "sheets" in sync.  Since most action at any auction takes place within the last two minutes, and much of that within the last 30 seconds, this isn't practical.  The best compromise seemed to be having some items only online and others only offline.  But the offline items could be promoted online to drum up interest.

Robert