What rates can Textvertising provide?
Textvertising offer Reverse Auctions at a number of premium rates to the end user - 10p, 25p, 50p, £1.00, £1.50, £2.50 and £5.00. The choice is yours.

How do reverse Auctions work?
The idea of reverse auctions is that rather than putting in a highest bid as with a normal auction, you have to put in the lowest bid. That bid also must be unique one. At the end of the auction, the winner (the person with the lowest unique bid) wins the auction.

It can take a little while to understand the inner workings, so take a look at the example below:



The end user simply texts your keyword and a bid in pence to enter - your service will take control of letting each entrant know by text message if their bid is unique, not unique, is the lowest unique bid etc. When a user is outbid they are also notified via a free alert to encourage them to take part again by entering another bid.

Why use Textvertising for a Reverse Auction?

• We offer a unique service to check bids are fair when using premium rate (where the end user pays a fee to bid). When a bid is placed, the handset is billed. If for some reason the handset does not have enough credit, the bid is "held" for a period of 3 days in the system whilst more attempts are made to bill the handset. Once billing occurs, the bid is placed. If the handset cannot be billed after a mandatory network retry period of 72 hours, the bid is dropped. This ensures that only bids are placed where the end user has paid their fee.
  
• New bids cannot be placed after the closing time, but bids still active in the retry system are held for up to 3 days from the closing date to ensure the service is fair to all who take part.
  
• Many providers do not offer such a service and bids placed that cannot be billed before the closing time are lost. This is even if they are billed afterward, which can lead to legal issues. Our service prevents such an issue
  
• Finally. Anyone placing a bid is given a unique ID which relates to their mobile number. Every bid they make prompts a response or a "receipt" for that bid as a reply SMS. At the end of the auction, the results can be displayed to all who have taken part so they can see the status of their bid relative to everyone else by referencing the ID. In this way, the results can be shown, without infringing any data protection rules.

How do I manage the service?
You do this through you admin page here at Textvertising. It is very easy to create, operate and manage a text reverse auction service. You can create your service and specify start and end time and limit bids per phone if required.

The system will report live to you all auction bids. This all happens in real time. The unique bid is hidden until the end of the auction and each user is given a unique ID for their phone number. This ID stays with them for future entries to the auction.

At the end of the competition, you can list all bids received alongside the unique ID's. This means that you can display the bids received but to comply with Data Protection hide the phone numbers.

What else do I need to know before I get started?
Take a look at our Premium Rate Messaging page which gives help and guidelines on usage of the service, how it is regulated and information on compliance with the regulatory guidelines.

How else can Textvertising help?
We do offer consistent advice on running a reverse auction service by text message and methods are built into our software to help protect you from doing something wrong.

How much revenue do I receive?
Take a look at our Premium Rate Messaging page which gives more information.

Service Costs
Depending on usage, our entry level individual plan costs just £24.99 per month whereas a fully commercial licensed service for Television and high profile marketing costs typically £950 per annum.