Chris Payne

September 11, 2000

Everyone knows Ebay is raking in the big bucks. Peer to peer networking is where it's at, and auctions can
make some serious money. While finding items to sell and attracting people to your auction is up to you,
this article will show you how to build an auction that actually works.



Introduction
Online auctions are marvelous things; bringing people together from all over the world, to sell things
amongst themselves, and take a cut off the top. Everyone has something that someone else wants, so this
idea is golden - and we all know how well Ebay is doing.

So now you want to build an auction, but don't know where to start? There is a lot of thought and
engineering that goes into such a development, so you'll need to start out on the right foot. We'll show
you the underlying database structures and how to make things work for a peer to peer auction.

This article will assume you have a good understanding of Active Server Pages and VBScript, and database
methods.



Contents:
How do I start?
The Auction Database
The Logic
Managing Bids
Resolving Bids
Determining A Winner
Considerations
Conclusions