Customer: Blomqvist
Delivery: New headless auction platform
Blomqvist, one of the Nordic region's leading auction houses since 1870, got a new headless auction platform built in React and Symfony, with real-time bidding and automated settlement.
Blomqvist was founded in 1870 by Christian W. Blomqvist and has been one of the Nordic region's leading auction houses ever since. Since Munch's breakthrough at Blomqvist in 1895, the house has played a central role in selling and promoting his art, and with over 25 specialists across different fields, they consider themselves to hold Norway's largest knowledge base in the industry. In addition to its annual auctions of paintings, sculptures, furniture, and decorative art, Blomqvist offers private sales and valuations to an international market.
Buyer behavior in the auction market had changed, and Blomqvist hadn't kept pace. The design and user experience weren't built for modern expectations, making it unnecessarily cumbersome to bid, browse items, and stay updated on objects of interest.
The solution was built headless, with React on the frontend and Symfony on the backend, fully decoupled from each other. The frontend delivers a dynamic experience for browsing items, placing bids, and managing user accounts, while the backend handles auctions, bid registration, customer verification, and notifications.
Avanti keeps the auctions running behind the scenes
Blomqvist's staff use the ERP/PIM system Avanti to prepare each item for sale: images, contracts with sellers, and descriptions. Once an item is ready, the auction duration and reserve price are set, and the item goes live on the platform at the scheduled time.
A queue system that handles thousands of bids per second
Every item has a reserve price and an end time. An advanced queue system ensures bids are processed in the correct order even under heavy volume, and auto-bid lets bidders set an upper limit and bid automatically if outbid. All bids are timestamped and synchronized to ensure fairness, and the auction's end time extends automatically for last-second bids, just like in a physical auction.
Payment and settlement, fully automated
The platform is integrated with Nets for payment and 24SevenOffice for accounting. When an item sells, the winning bidder's card is charged, and invoices are generated automatically for both buyer and seller. Buyers and sellers can track the settlement as it happens, and sales and accounting data can be exported to Excel for further analysis.
Search and alerts built for collectors
ElasticSearch powers search across items, historical data, and contracts, with support for saved searches, filtering, and fault-tolerant search terms. Notifications go out via SendGrid for email and Systor Vest for SMS, important in an auction where every second can decide whether a bid makes it in time.
The rest of the stack is built for stability under heavy load: Cloudflare caches images and static files and protects against DDoS attacks, Strapi manages campaign content, and Fotoware ensures high-resolution images of every item are always up to date, so customers can zoom in on details without seeing the object in person.
With a user-centered design, it's now significantly easier to place bids, browse items, and get alerts on things of interest. Blomqvist now runs new auctions every week, with bidders from around the world, a platform that keeps pace with an auction house that has sold art for over 150 years.
