Plant shutdowns, restaurant closeouts, warehouse liquidations — hundreds of heavy lots, buyers who won’t bid without the nameplate, and a consignor who wants a clean settlement. Hammerwerks catalogs it fast, keeps the specs straight, won’t invent a price it can’t stand behind, and settles the money against a contract nobody can argue with.
Liquidations aren’t won on comps — they’re won on turnaround. Every lot has to be shot, described, and live before the doors lock for good, and you can’t do four hundred of them alone.
You can’t photograph four hundred lots by yourself with a week left on the lease. Walk the floor shooting lot by lot from your phone while the AI drafts a title, description, category, and condition off the photos — a second AI reviews, and you approve each one. Hand a helper the capture link — no login, no seat, revocable the moment you’re done — and their shots land straight in your workbench. It saves the typing, not the deciding.
Commercial equipment lives or dies on the spec line. The fields prompt for make, model, serial, capacity, voltage or phase, hours, and year — the draft fills what it can read off the nameplate and you confirm the rest. Punch in a VIN and it runs the identifier and recall lookup; a maker’s mark or a UPC gets checked too. So a reach truck, a walk-in cooler, and a CNC lathe each carry the details a buyer actually filters on, not a wall of prose.
Industrial buyers bid on what they can see — the nameplate, the hour meter, the gouge in the table. Every lot page carries as many photos as you shoot, on your own domain and branded to your house, so the catalog reads as yours and not a templated marketplace listing. And the bidder list you build stays yours — export it anytime.
A fantasy number on a $40,000 machine costs you the consignor. Better an honest opening bid than a value range nothing supports.
Where there’s a real market — forklifts, common kitchen lines, shop tools, box trucks — the AI drafts a value range and puts a confidence score on it. A second AI checks the draft. You see exactly how far to trust the number before it ever goes in front of a seller.
Thin markets — a purpose-built line, a rare press, one-off tooling — have no comparable sales to price against. On those the tool flags low confidence and steers you to an opening bid instead of a made-up estimate. It won’t guess the true condition of a rebuilt machine from a photo either. You stay the expert; it does the typing.
Each lot is checked against NHTSA and CPSC recall data as it’s cataloged — worth its weight when a restaurant or facility sale is full of consumer-grade appliances and small equipment. It flags known recalls. It does not do code, gas, or safety inspection — that stays your call.
The consignor on a liquidation is often a business owner having the worst month of their year, or a lender’s receiver who reads every line twice. The settlement has to be clean, provable, and never ahead of money that hasn’t cleared. Hammerwerks carries the money end to end.
Six weeks after the sale, someone questions the commission on the big machine. Send the consignor the agreement, they sign it electronically, you countersign. The signed document is fingerprinted and the whole signing is recorded, so you can prove later that nothing changed — right down to the rate. And the settlement statement settles against that signed contract, so commission and fees can’t drift between the handshake and the check.
The winning bidder on the $40,000 lot goes quiet for a week. Hammerwerks won’t let you pay out a lot before the buyer’s money for it is collected — so you’re never fronting your own cash on an invoice that hasn’t cleared. Partial payments settle on what’s actually in. Set a commission rate per seller, and pay each one by check or electronically — recorded against the sale.
Every sale reconciles — money in from buyers equals what you paid out, plus your commission and premium, plus tax, plus what’s still owed. See how much consignor money you’re holding at any moment, export the whole ledger to a spreadsheet, and pull a per-consignor 1099 worksheet and a sales-tax remittance report when the year closes. The arithmetic that used to eat a weekend is just there.
Both. Run a straight online-timed sale with proxy and max bids and a soft-close extension so nothing gets sniped, or run the floor and the internet at once from the clerk console — paddle bids and online bids in one place, fair warning and hammer one click each. Same catalog either way.
Honestly, no — that’s not our edge. Proxibid and HiBid have huge registered-buyer pools; we don’t. Plenty of our customers still list the big-ticket lots on those marketplaces for reach and run the cataloging, the branded catalog, and the settlement in Hammerwerks. Our value is the workflow and owning your bidder list — not the audience.
It doesn’t pretend to. AI can’t reliably price a vertical with no comparable sales, and it can’t judge the true condition of high-value or rebuilt equipment from photos. On those lots it tells you it’s uncertain and hands you an opening-bid path — the estimate is yours to set from experience.
A facility sale can have a lender, the business owner, and a landlord all with a claim on the proceeds. Set a commission rate per seller and give each their own settlement statement — every one settling against the contract that party actually signed. And the funds-available rule holds across all of them: nobody gets paid out ahead of the buyer money that’s cleared.
No commission on the hammer, ever, and no per-bidder fee. You pay a flat monthly tier by how many lots you run — Solo $99 (200 lots), Growth $299 (1,000), Scale $799 (5,000), 50¢/lot above that — plus a one-time $499 setup that’s waived with a promo code. A plant closure that runs to several hundred lots rides on Growth, and there’s never a cut of the hammer.