No-Sale Auto-Relist: When the Reserve Isn’t Met, the Lot Goes to Market
Why a failed auction doesn’t mean a back-of-the-warehouse return — and how the channel-exclusivity guard handles the channel switch atomically.
An auction that doesn’t hit reserve isn’t a failure — it’s data. The bidders told you what they think the lot is worth, and the answer is "less than your reserve." The right next move is usually to relist the lot on the market with a more flexible structure (negotiation, fixed-price-with-discount, multi-buyer split). The platform automates that next move.
The trigger
When the auction settlement cron determines reserve wasn’t met, the F5 auto-relist flow fires. The lot is unpublished from auction (channel-exclusivity guard sets published_channel = none), and the underlying batch is republished to market with the same description, photos, and a starting price set to the highest non-reserve-met bid (or a tenant-configured percentage of it).
What stays
The watchlist count. Buyers who watched the auction get notified that the lot is now on market — same goods, different channel. The deal-cycle clock continues from the auction’s start, so analytics report the true time-from-listed-to-sold across both channels.
What changes
The structure. Auction is competitive bidding; market is negotiation or fixed price. The seller can edit the market listing’s price strategy (negotiable, indicative, fixed) and the visibility (public, restricted to the auction’s top bidders, restricted to verified buyers) without rebuilding the listing from scratch.
Opt-out
If the seller doesn’t want auto-relist (some lots are auction-or-nothing for confidentiality reasons), the option is on the lot at creation time. Default is on; the dashboard widget surfaces the relisted lots so the seller knows where they went.