Forty consignors this week. A box of tools, a dresser, somebody’s coins. A sale to close by Saturday — and then a stack of settlement statements, every one a chance to get the commission wrong and hear about it six weeks later. And it’s mostly you. Hammerwerks carries the volume and the money that comes after it.
It’s Thursday night. The sale’s Saturday. Ninety lots don’t have so much as a title yet, and you’re the only one who knows what half of it is. That’s the weekly squeeze — and this is the part Hammerwerks is actually built to speed up.
Send a scoped, no-login link and your helper shoots lots straight into your workbench from their own phone — no seat to set up, no password to share. It’s a browser link you can revoke the moment the sale is catalogued. Offline is best-effort: photos hold on the phone and sync when signal comes back.
From the photos, the AI drafts a title, description, category, condition, and a value range — each with a confidence score. A second AI reviews the draft. Then you approve. It saves the typing, not the deciding; on a hundred-lot consignment sale that’s the difference between Thursday night and Saturday morning.
Tools one lot, a dresser the next, a box of coins, a chainsaw, a china cabinet. The workbench asks the right question per category instead of forcing everything through one generic form — so a mixed consignment sale stays in one catalog instead of five spreadsheets.
Forty sellers had a lot hammer, so now it’s forty rows of gross minus commission minus fees. Fat-finger one and that consignor calls in six weeks with a bad feeling and a screenshot. Many sellers is what makes settlement the place the evening disappears. Hammerwerks does that math so the number is just the number.
When the sale settles, Hammerwerks generates a draft statement for every seller who had a lot hammer — each lot with its hammer price, the commission, and the net. Gross minus commission minus fees, computed. You review before any money moves.
The regular who brings a trailer every week and the one-time estate consignor don’t have to share a commission rate. Set the rate per seller and the statement math follows it — no re-keying, no separate ledger.
Consignment means used goods of unknown history. Every lot is checked against NHTSA and CPSC recall data — the drop-side crib, the recalled space heater, the pressure washer — so you catch it before it’s on the block, not after.
Cataloging is the front of the job. The back of it is where the trust gets tested — the consignor who swears the commission was different, the payout you cut before the buyer’s money cleared, the books that won’t quite tie out come tax time. Hammerwerks carries the money end to end, from the signed agreement to the check, so none of that lands on you at 11 p.m.
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 terms. And the settlement statement settles against that signed contract, so the commission and fees on the payout are the ones the consignor actually agreed to. No drift between the handshake and the check.
When a statement is ready, pay the consignor by check or electronically and record it against the sale. The rule Hammerwerks holds: it won’t let you pay out a lot before the buyer’s money for it is collected — so you’re never fronting a payout on an invoice that hasn’t cleared. Partial payments settle on the money that’s in.
Every sale reconciles — money in from buyers equals what you paid consignors, 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 when the year closes. The arithmetic that used to eat a Sunday is just there.
Honestly, no — not the way HiBid or Proxibid can. They have huge registered-bidder pools and we don’t. If raw reach is the whole game for you, they win that. Our edge is the workflow: faster cataloging, cleaner per-seller settlement, transparent pricing, and a bidder list that stays yours instead of theirs.
No, and it won’t pretend to. AI can’t reliably grade or authenticate coins, jewelry, or fine art from a photo, and it can’t price a thin vertical with no comparable sales. When it’s out of its depth it says so — you’ll get “no estimate; suggest an opening bid” instead of a made-up number that burns your credibility with your buyers.
Yes. The simplest way is the capture link — hand it to as many helpers as you need and they all shoot lots into the same workbench from their own phones, no login to set up. On a big weekly consignment that means several people cataloguing the same sale at the same time instead of one person working a stack alone.
It’s a scoped, revocable shared link — not a per-person secure login. Anyone with the link can add lots to that one workbench until you turn it off, and you turn it off the moment cataloging is done. Treat it like a key you hand out for the afternoon and take back that evening.
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. Compare that to the ~5–8% of hammer gross a marketplace takes on every weekly sale.