Real-Time Auction & Live Bidding Platform
A WebSocket bidding engine for an online auction house that replaced 5-second polling with sub-100ms bid updates and held 25,000 concurrent bidders on closing nights without downtime.
01The Challenge
An online auction house ran its bidding on a 5-second polling loop, so bidders regularly submitted against a stale price and lost lots they believed they had won. Every closing night produced disputes the support team had to settle by hand, and the platform buckled under the concurrency spike in the final minutes of each auction.
02The Solution
We replaced polling with an event-driven bidding engine that sequences every bid atomically in Redis before fanning the new price out over WebSockets to all connected bidders, added anti-snipe rules that automatically extend a lot when a bid lands in its closing seconds, and layered a synchronized bid overlay onto the live video stream. The whole stack was load-tested to 25,000 concurrent bidders before launch and scales horizontally behind the auction schedule.
Tech Stack
Key Deliverables
- WebSocket bidding engine with sub-100ms price fan-out
- Atomic bid ordering & anti-snipe automatic lot extension
- Live video streams with a synchronized real-time bid overlay
Business Impact
"Brought bid update latency from 5 seconds to under 100ms, eliminated disputed bid-order tickets entirely in the first six months post-launch, and sustained 25,000 concurrent bidders through closing nights with zero downtime."
Figures shown are representative of typical engagement outcomes. Individual results vary with scope, data quality, and existing systems.
Tell us what you're building.
We'll come back within a day with a clear plan — no jargon, no lock-in, no pitch deck.
15-min session · No commitment · Response within 24 h