Real-Time Online Auction System with Concurrent Bid Validation and Soft-Closing Mechanism

For online auction, changes in prices should be passed on in real time, there should be a level playing field in the auction and the transactions should be passed securely. The normal traffic towards the old auction sites is serviced, and their page is refreshed frequently. Those methods work,. They can make contributions to last minute automated bidding and bid issues, and don't always cause any obvious delays at the close of the auction. This paper presents an efficient real-time auction system that is suitable for managing bidding and transactions in an auction. It is a system with 3 features, namely: live bid streaming, atomic bidds validation and autoextending the auction.To avoid race conditions incoming bids have to be compared to the evolving increment rules and all participants are updated in real time with a price change via two way WebSocket connections. In the few seconds the system automatically keeps the countdown running, if there are competing bids, all get the same amount of time to make the bid. The platform includes an item catalog management, an automatic picking of items, tracking of the transaction history, and user-based controls on roles, in addition to the live bidding engine. The web application was created with the use of React, Node, Express, MongoDB and JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication. 20 individuals and 150 mock simultaneous bids on listings were involved in the first test. There were 150 bids sent out, 147 of which were successfully processed and displayed under 70 msec and 98% of the bids were synchronized without any duplicate bids or state issues. The validation part also dealt with simultaneous bids, by discarding out of sequence bids and giving immediate notification to user. The initial results show the use of event driven communication and validation to give a strong start to a competitive digital auction. The concept behind the web page is to be able to be able to supply a fair bidding process, and the user with a honest platform which could be scalable to the modern day online shopping. Keywords— Online Auction Systems, Real-Time Web Applications, WebSocket Communication, Concurrency Control, Atomic Transactions, Event-Driven Architecture, AntiSniping Mechanisms, Electronic Commerce Platforms