He runs the VIN himself. He hunts for the open recall you didn’t list and the title brand you soft-pedaled. On a thirty-thousand-dollar lot, one thing you got wrong is the whole sale gone. So put the VIN decode and the open recalls in the catalog first — the stuff he was going to find anyway.
You might sell forty cars, not four hundred. There’s no pile of cheap lots to bury a sloppy one in. Each catalog page is a big-ticket sale standing on its own, and it has to be right.
Type in the VIN and the NHTSA database returns the structured facts — year, make, model, engine, plant — and flags any open recall campaigns. Same for the identifiers that matter on a lot: UPCs, maker’s marks, the rest. Your serious buyers were going to run it themselves. Be the auctioneer who already put it in the catalog.
From your photos the AI drafts a title, description, category, condition, and a value range — each with a confidence score — and a second AI reviews before you ever see it. You approve every lot. On a modified build or a thin market where nobody’s sure, it tells you it’s not sure instead of inventing a number that burns you with the consignor. It saves the typing, not the deciding.
A car needs the corners, the interior, under-hood, undercarriage, the wheels, the odometer, the VIN plate, the service records. That’s a lot of shooting. Hand a helper a no-login capture link — scoped and revocable — and their phone shots land straight in your workbench. No account, no app, and you shut the link off when the sale’s done.
On a car lot the check is large, and a buyer who wins and then goes quiet costs you real money — not a forty-dollar no-pay. The point isn’t just to hammer it. It’s to collect it before the vehicle leaves the lot.
Run the floor from the clerk console with online bidders in at the same time — paddles in the room and bids from the internet in one view, fair warning and hammer a click each. Absentee, proxy, and max bids for the buyers who can’t make the date, and a soft-close that extends the clock when a late online bid lands, so nobody steals a car in the last second.
Invoices compute the hammer, your buyer’s premium, and sales tax on their own. Take payment by card through Stripe, or record the cash, check, or wire when it clears. And the funds-available gate won’t let you settle a lot out before the buyer’s money for it is actually in — so you’re never handing over a title against a payment that hasn’t landed.
Every house gets its own branded bidder site on your name, not a marketplace’s. The people who register and bid are your buyers — export the whole list any time. We won’t pool them into someone else’s audience and rent them back to you next sale.
No — Hammerwerks isn’t a DMV tool, and I’m not going to pretend it files your state paperwork. What it does is record the sale clean — VIN, buyer, hammer, invoice, payment — so the transfer is a straightforward hand-off. The state forms are still yours to file.
You don’t release against money you don’t have. Payment gets recorded when it actually clears — card, cash, check, or wire — and the funds-available gate keeps you from settling a lot out before the buyer’s funds for it are in. The underbidders are right there too, ranked, so if a deal falls through you know exactly who to call next.
Honestly, no — that’s not our edge. HiBid and Proxibid have huge registered-buyer pools and we don’t. Plenty of folks list the big lots there for reach and still run the cataloging, the white-label catalog, the bidding, and the money in Hammerwerks. What you get from us is the workflow and a bidder list you actually own — not the size of the crowd.
Yes. The clerk sees floor bids and online bids in one interface, in real time. A late online bid extends the close so it doesn’t get sniped, and absentee and max bids run for anyone who couldn’t be there. Same catalog whether you run it live-hybrid or straight online-timed.
Both are configurable and both show on the buyer’s invoice, so there’s no argument at checkout about what got added on top of the hammer. And no hammer percentage comes to us — flat pricing, so a $40,000 car doesn’t cost you more to sell than a $4,000 one.
Want to kick the tires first? The free VIN decoder is right here. 30-day money-back, cancel anytime, and your data exports whenever you want it.
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