People ask what onboarding actually looks like. Not the marketing version — the real version. Here’s a first-week timeline for a general estate sale house getting a Hammerwerks account off the ground.
Monday: signup + setup (30 minutes)
Create the account. Type the business name. Pick a tier (most first-timers land on Growth — $299/mo, 1,000 lots, 500 AI credits). Add the promo code we gave you on the call to waive the $499 setup fee.
Then five minutes of setup:
- Branding: upload a logo, pick colors. Or don’t — the default broadside theme reads as a professional auction house without any customization.
- Fields: the default field schema covers general estate. If your first sale is farm or vehicles, switch to that vertical — VIN and mileage show up as first-class fields instead of hidden under "notes."
- Payouts: connect Stripe. Standard onboarding flow, 8 minutes if you have your EIN and bank account handy.
- Team: invite the one or two people who help you catalog. Unlimited seats, five built-in roles.
You’re done with setup. Total time from "create account" to "ready to catalog": under 30 minutes.
Tuesday: catalog the sale
Create the auction. Name it, set the open + close dates, pick online-timed or hybrid (in-person + online). Type in a location if you’re running in-person. Save.
Now catalog. Three paths — pick the one that matches how the sale came to you:
- You’re on-site with a phone: open the capture screen, shoot lot by lot. AI drafts titles and descriptions from the photos. For books/records/packaged goods, tap the scan button and point at the barcode. The lot fills itself in.
- You have a folder of photos on your laptop: drag them into the bulk photo drop zone. The AI clusters them into likely-same-lot groups. You rename each cluster, review, publish.
- You have a spreadsheet: paste-import the CSV. Every row becomes a draft lot. You’ll still want to photograph and review, but the structural data (title, category, reserve, etc.) is done.
Most first sales are a mix — some big items you shoot on-site, some fill-in with the phone, some paste of old inventory. All three flows converge to the same kanban workbench where you approve lots one at a time.
Realistic pace for a 100-lot general sale, first time on the platform: 2–3 hours end-to-end. Second sale drops to 60–90 minutes.
Wednesday: publish
Click Publish on the auction. The public catalog appears at yourhouse.hammerwerks.com (or your own domain if you added one). Every bidder who registers to bid goes into your tenant, on your subdomain, with your name in the from-line of every email.
Send the pre-sale blast to your existing bidder list. If you don’t have one yet, cross-post the auction URL to wherever your local bidders hang out — Facebook groups, HiBid if you use it, the county classifieds. Every bidder who registers stays yours.
Thursday–Friday: bidders bid
Proxy bidding is on by default. Bidders type their max, the system bids for them up to that max, anti-snipe extends the close on late activity. Closing-soon emails go out at whatever schedule the auction settings specify (default: 24h, 1h). Your job is to answer bidder questions and enjoy that you’re not manually clicking anything.
If it’s a hybrid sale (in-person + online), you’ll be reviewing the clerk console the day before — that’s the tool you’ll use during the actual live sale to run the room.
Saturday: run the sale
For an online-only auction: nothing. Lots close on their schedule. Invoices generate automatically. Buyers with cards on file get charged in the background. You’ll get an email when the last lot closes.
For hybrid (in-person + online): open the clerk console on a laptop at the venue. Sell-next brings up each lot, floor bids go in through the paddle number, online bids stream in from remote bidders, hammer commits the sale. Everything is one tab. If the Wi-Fi drops, refresh the page and pick up where you left off — state lives on the server, not the browser.
Cashier desk is a separate tab your helper runs at the checkout table. Type a paddle, see the buyer’s lots and total, take cash/check/card, print the receipt.
Sunday: settle up
Open the sale report. Verify the totals against your paper log. Print seller statements — one PDF per consignor, ready to hand out at your Monday settlement meeting. Any unpaid invoices show up as a highlighted list at the top of the report.
That’s the loop. If you want to keep going, the auto-settlement worker’s already charged all the online buyers with saved payment methods. Your Stripe balance shows what came in. Your consignor statements show what needs to go out. The books close while you have coffee.
Week two: refinements
By your second auction you’ll have opinions. Turn on Buy-It-Now on passed lots (recover 5–15% of your usually-unsold gross). Set the default starting bid to something other than $1 if your market treats it as a bad-faith opener. Adjust the fair-warning countdown on hybrid sales. Add a couple of custom fields for your specific vertical. Book a 15-minute call with us if you get stuck — the founder answers those calls, not a support tier.
The 30-day money-back promise is real: if the first auction on Hammerwerks doesn’t save you time, we refund and export your data. We’d rather have that be the deal than have you stuck on a tool that isn’t working.