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A good auction extension deserves a good shop window, so we made one. Heritage & Hearth is a template for an auction house, built on HikaAuction and HikaShop. Timed auctions and a shop of fixed-price pieces sit under one header and one cart. The home page opens with a hero slider whose slides are your sales, and a strip under it counts down to the moment bidding opens or closes. Lots are listed as a catalogue table, with the lot number, the photograph, the estimate, the current bid and the time left, and a sale's page has its own tabs: all lots, open lots, upcoming, prices realised, then My bids and Favourites for a logged in visitor. The lot page is built around the bid box: a gallery with thumbnails, the estimate above the title, tabs for the description, the condition report and the provenance, the bid history, and a bid bar fixed at the bottom of the screen on a phone. The checkout, the customer area with its bidding history and won auctions, and the vendor area of HikaMarket follow the same style.

An auction house often asks its bidders to register for a sale before they bid: it checks who they are, and for the expensive lots it may ask for a bank reference. HikaAuction now does it. With the new Bidder approval option, set for every auction or only for the categories you select (a sale is a category of lots), a logged in customer who is not approved yet sees a request form on the product page instead of the bid buttons. The form is made of HikaShop custom fields: we create a text area asking why they wish to bid and a file field for a document, a bank certificate for instance, and you change them like any other custom field. You answer from the new Approvals page of HikaAuction: tick one or several requests, type a note if you want one, then approve or decline. You can also approve a client you already know without waiting for a request. The shop and the bidder get an email at each step, an approved bidder can bid at once on every auction of the sale, and customers follow their requests in a new My registrations page of their account.

An auction can now have a Buy it Now price, set on the product next to the reserve price. While the current price is under it, customers see a "Buy it Now for X" button above the bid buttons. After a confirmation, the auction ends at once and they win it at that price, even over higher maximum bids, then pay it through the usual won auction checkout. The button goes away as soon as the bids bring the current price to the Buy it Now price. It is not available in Dutch auction mode.

In a Vickrey auction, the winner pays the second-highest bid plus the increment, and customers bid with a maximum that only raises the price when others bid. It is fair, but not everyone knows how it works. Two changes help them. With the new option Allow fixed bids next to max bids, the bid popup offers "Bid this amount", which sets the price to that amount right away, like on most auction sites, next to "Set as max bid". And the leading bidder now sees a box above the bid buttons with the price they are winning at, their max bid and a reminder of what they will pay, and the button becomes "Raise my max bid". Before, the leader was offered a "Bid for" button with a price above their own maximum, and thought their bid was not registered.