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Bidforsin: internationalising a lowest-unique-bid auction

Bidforsin.com set out to run lowest-unique-bid auctions for more than one market at once: multiple languages, multiple countries, multiple currencies, with SMS bidding extending reach beyond the browser. Built in 2017, it is our practice’s cleanest example of internationalisation as a platform’s defining feature.

By E Multitech Solution Engineering Team Published Substantially revised 4 min read

Historical project. This article describes a platform delivered in 2017. It has been editorially rewritten for clarity; unsupported superlatives in the original announcement have been removed and are logged in the editorial changelog.

The premise: one platform, many markets

Bidforsin.com was a consumer lowest-unique-bid auction with an ambition unusual among our earlier builds: it was designed from the start to operate across markets — multiple languages, multiple countries and multiple currencies on one platform, with a breadth of product categories linked into its auctions.

For the operator, the attraction is obvious: one product, many audiences. For the engineering, it means internationalisation cannot be a translation file added at the end — it has to shape the data model.

Bidforsin.com auction interface showing categorised lots and bidding controls
The Bidforsin interface as delivered in 2017 (original project screenshot).

What multi-market actually required

Running the same auction mechanic in several markets multiplies the bookkeeping behind every screen: prices and bids denominated per currency; auctions scoped per country; interface text resolved per language; and category structures broad enough to hold a multi-market catalogue without becoming incoherent. The lowest-unique-bid engine at the centre is indifferent to all of this — which is precisely why the internationalisation layer, not the mechanic, was the project’s real work.

Reach beyond the browser

The 2017 build also treated acquisition and reach as platform features rather than marketing afterthoughts: social integration with the networks of the day (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), SMS notifications for auction events, and — notably — bidding by SMS, keeping participants in markets and moments without reliable data connections inside the game. The same reach-first instinct appears in our other 2017 build, Chasebid, which pushed it further still.

Engineering notes

Bidforsin was written in PHP on an MVC framework with MySQL, and — continuing the pattern that began with Swilcanbids — Node.js alongside Ajax and jQuery for the interactive bidding surfaces, over a responsive Bootstrap/HTML5 front end.

In hindsight: a 2026 perspective

The following is present-day editorial perspective, not part of the 2017 record.

Internationalisation has since moved from differentiator to baseline: the multilingual, multi-currency capabilities Bidforsin had to build bespoke are now standing requirements in most marketplace briefs we receive. The durable lesson is about sequencing — i18n decisions are data-model decisions, cheapest on day one and dearest on day five hundred. It is a lesson we apply verbatim in today’s auction and marketplace work, where multi-market operation is designed in before the first screen is drawn.