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What I learned running my first big auction (and 4 other April sales)

Five auctions, $747,668 gross, 89.1% clearance, and an honest look at our own first big sale on Creatures.

Author

Elliott Garber
May 02, 2026

Hey everyone,

The last ten days of April brought a cluster of highland sales worth covering. Five auctions, four different platforms, 201 cattle lots offered, 179 sold, for a combined $747,668. The sales were:

The No Bull was our own sale and the most informative one for me personally, so I'm leading with the deep dive on it. Highlights from the other four follow.

The No Bull Highland and Miniature Auction: what we learned

14 lots offered, 13 sold, 92.9% clearance, $66,334 gross. Average sale price $5,103, high $12,300 (Raspberry), low $2,025. Total of 527 bids placed across the sale, with 9 identified buyers winning lots.

The single most-contested lot was Riona, who drew 88 bids before settling at $4,750. One buyer assembled a small group of four heifers from my own consignment for a combined $19,150. Another buyer used the Buy Now option to lock in Geillis at $7,500 before the bidding even opened.

Among the five highland sales we tracked this month, the No Bull cleared second-highest, behind only the Roundup's hybrid live event. It cleared the strongest of any online-only sale.

The biggest lesson: bid friction was real

Several buyers told us after the sale that they were planning to jump in on additional lots in the closing minutes but didn't have time to enter their payment information from scratch. On Creatures, the 5% credit card hold is currently per-listing, not per-account. So a buyer who bid on three different animals had to enter their card three times.

We're exploring options to move payment authorization to one account-level setup, with the required 5% hold applied automatically when a buyer places a bid. That’s the experience buyers expect from mature auction platforms if there is any payment information required at all.

The other big piece of feedback: bid increments

A separate piece of feedback: some people watching thought the early bid increments were too small. Going up by $10 between $500 and $999 may have felt like a lot of small back-and-forth that wore bidders out before the price reached meaningful levels. Several people suggested $100 increments throughout would have produced higher final prices.

We took this seriously, but the established behavioral economics gives us reasons not to assume larger increments would automatically raise prices. Three findings worth knowing:

Sunk cost commitment. Bidders who've placed many bids tend to feel more invested in winning, not less. The 30-bid bidder is psychologically "in" on the animal in a way the 2-bid bidder isn't.

The endowment effect. Each bid that puts you in the leading position creates a small sense of ownership. Losing that leading position feels like a loss, and humans are loss-averse. Bidders who briefly held the high bid during a long ratchet may be willing to fight harder to keep it.

Foot in the door. Small first commitments often lead to larger subsequent ones. A buyer who placed a $1,200 bid is more invested in the animal than a buyer who never touched the bid button.

These are useful things to understand, but not proof another way would be better. None of them establishes that a $10 increment at $500 produces a higher final price than a $100 increment would. The honest answer is that we'd need to test it. One event isn't enough data to prove the current bid increment setup is optimal.

What we can say more confidently is that the simpler answer to "small bids felt exhausting" is to use proxy bidding. Creatures lets you set a maximum bid once and walk away. The system bids on your behalf one increment above whatever the next-highest bidder enters, up to your max. Set your number, go feed the cattle, and the system handles the rest. If buyers are manually clicking 50 times in a row, that is partly on us. Proxy bidding needs to be impossible to miss in the bid placement flow.

We're going to keep the current increment schedule for now and focus on making proxy bidding more prominent. If you bid in this sale without setting a max bid, give it a try at the next event.

What worked

The sale had serious bidding engagement, and the transparent profile-based format may have helped. 527 total bids on 14 lots, an average of 38 bids per lot. It was a lot of fun to see the friendly banter in the Activity Timeline on each listing between competing bidders, sellers, and casual observers. This is something I’ve really been looking forward to bringing to the livestock space from a couple of the most successful car auction sites out there.

No reserve prices removed the post-bid negotiation loop entirely. Every lot that received any bid sold to the highest bidder, no second-guessing, no "below reserve" lots dragging down clearance. This is a structural advantage of the no-reserve format that the data clearly supports.

What didn't work

One lot, Elsa (a white highland heifer), received zero bids during the event window. The likely cause was a $5,000 starting bid that priced her above the level the buyer pool was willing to open at. Even in a no-reserve auction, the starting bid functions as an effective reserve. If no one bids, the lot doesn't sell.

A note for consignors thinking about future no-reserve events: start your bidding really low, even below where you think you'd actually be comfortable selling the animal. I know that feels uncomfortable. The instinct is to anchor the starting bid near the price you hope to clear. But low starting bids are the only way to pretty much guarantee bids in the first place, and once buyers are engaged, the small early increments and an active bidder pool tend to push the price toward market or sometimes beyond it. A high starting bid shuts down the very engagement that drives a lot to its true clearing price.

Thank you

I've been working toward this sale for a couple of years. To see everyone show up the way you did, with animals to consign, with bids, with general interest, with shares on social media, meant a lot. Thank you to the consignors who trusted us with their cattle, the buyers who showed up ready to compete, and everyone who watched, commented, and helped spread the word. This first big multi-consignor sale on Creatures was only possible because of you. I'm grateful, and I'm already looking forward to what’s next. We’re just getting started!

A reminder that Creatures is more than auctions

Alongside the bidding, we ran an Auction Day Profile Builder Challenge: a live leaderboard at the bottom of the event page tracking new animal profiles, management records, and pedigree links added to Creatures during the sale. Top five finishers earned Creatures Credit good for any purchase on the platform. Congratulations to Ginger Jackson ($500), Lexie Cave ($350), Rickee Miller ($200), Jeannette Robinson ($100), and Chelse Krueger ($50). Across the leaderboard, participants added more than 200 new animal profiles and more than 340 management and breeding records over the course of the day.

It was a small reminder of what Creatures is really built for. Auctions are just one feature. The platform is where animals live online, with profiles, pedigrees, health records, and the daily data that breeders and owners actually use. We're going to keep finding ways to surface that during sale events.

The other four sales

Held at Mo-Kan Livestock Auction in Butler, Missouri, with simultaneous online bidding via DVAuction. Hybrid format, multi-consignor.

  • 138 lots, 132 sold, 95.7% clearance (the strongest of any sale we tracked this cycle).

  • Gross $363,125. Average $2,751, median $2,300.

  • Females (67 sold): average $3,646, median $3,700.

  • Males (59 sold): average $1,536, median $1,100. Heavy steer presence in the dispersal sections pulls the male average down.

  • Cow-calf pairs (6 sold): average $4,700, median $4,750.

  • High sale: Lot 6014 Garfield, an AHCA pending bull, at $8,200.

  • All five herd dispersals (Colonial Farm, Purdy, Starter, 3HP, JS) cleared 100%.

  • Halter training carried a +102% premium ($4,568 vs $2,262 average) which was the biggest single attribute differentiator we measured.

Northwest Highland Cattle Association sale on CowBuyer. Online, multi-consignor, focused on the Pacific Northwest AHCA breeder community.

  • 9 cattle lots, 8 sold, 88.9% clearance.

  • Gross $72,600. Average $9,075, median $9,300.

  • All sold lots were females (8 sold): average $9,075, median $9,300, range $5,000 to $13,000. No male cattle in this catalog.

  • High sale: Lot 7 at $13,000.

  • Single no-sale was a cow-calf pair that drew no bids.

Multi-consignor: Webb Cattle Company, Webb + Circle AM Cattle Company, and Webb + Little Lucky Cattle Company.

  • 22 cattle lots offered (plus 5 Valais Blacknose sheep, none of which met reserve).

  • 18 cattle sold, 81.8% clearance, gross $217,509.

  • All sold cattle were females (18 sold): average $12,084, median $12,000, range $5,350 to $20,500.

  • High sale: Primrose, a micro/mini chondro positive black tipped HighPark heifer at $20,500.

  • Chondro positive heifers averaged $15,983 vs $10,134 for chondro negative, a +58% premium that continues to hold up across Webb sales.

Multi-consignor highland and mini sale running on the W2 auction platform.

  • 18 cattle lots, 8 sold, 44.4% clearance

  • Gross $28,100. Average $3,513, median $3,000.

  • Females (4 sold): average $5,125, median $5,000.

  • Males (4 sold): average $1,900, median $2,000. Female premium over male was +170%.

  • High sale: $7,500.

The picture across all five

5 sales, 10 days, 201 cattle lots offered, 179 sold, $747,668 gross. Overall clearance across the cycle was 89.1%, which is healthy by any reasonable benchmark.

A few themes worth tracking through the rest of the year:

Halter training and chondro status are doing more work than papers. The cleanest examples in this cycle were the Roundup's +102% halter premium ($4,568 vs $2,262) and Webb's +58% chondro+ premium ($15,983 vs $10,134). AHCA papers added value too, but the differentiator gap was smaller than what halter training and chondro testing produced in these specific sales. The broader historical pattern is noisier, but those two traits clearly mattered here.

The female premium tracked where it usually does for breeding sales. SHCR females averaged 2.4x what males brought; WL females averaged 2.7x. That gap is standard whenever a sale is built around breeding stock, since reproductive potential drives most of the animal's value. Commercial and pet-focused channels work differently. There, steers and other males trade much closer to females because the buyer is paying for the animal itself rather than its breeding future.

Format matters as much as the cattle. The same broader buyer pool participated across multiple sales, but clearance and average prices varied dramatically based on platform, sale structure, and event format. Hybrid live formats cleared best. No-reserve cleared cleanly. Online-only multi-consignor sales were the most variable.

We'll keep tracking it.

Coming up

TODAY: Saturday, May 2

Next Saturday, May 9

  • MWHCA Highland Cattle Sale at Smokey Lane Stables. Midwest Highland Cattle Association annual sale, partnering with Smokey Lane Stables in Sugarcreek, Ohio (Amish Country). AHCA registered focus, cattle auction starts at noon, online bidding through CowBuyer.

  • Mother's Day Weekend Auction on Creatures. Hosted by Seven Daugherty Farm. No buyer fees, no reserves, bidding closes 8pm Eastern on Saturday May 9. This will be the second big sale event on Creatures, and the first one run by someone other than me! That’s a big part of my goal for the platform, to make it easy for others to put together and run their own customized sale events.

We'll cover all four in the next newsletter! Until then, thanks as always for your interest and support.

Elliott

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