Meerkat Online Auctions

Real-time online auctions, engineered for the live moment

We built Meerkat to solve one deceptively hard problem: how do you make an online auction feel as fast, fair and electric as standing in the room? When the auctioneer’s hammer is about to fall, milliseconds matter. A laggy stream or a slow bid isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s a lost sale and a frustrated buyer.

Meerkat is our answer: a full-featured, enterprise-grade auction platform we designed and built for our client Meerkat Online Auctions — a technology-service company that runs live online auctions as a service for established auction houses. Auction houses keep their brand, their auctioneer and their floor; Meerkat supplies the streaming, bidding and back-office technology that takes the sale online. Since launch it has grown into a trusted leader in online auction services across Southern Africa. Here’s what’s under the hood.

Broadcast-quality live streaming with Dolby OptiView

The heart of any live auction is the broadcast, and this is where Meerkat separates itself. Live auctions stream over Dolby OptiView Real-Time Streaming (formerly Millicast) — engineered for sub-500-millisecond latency at scale. Traditional streaming introduces delays of 10 to 30 seconds; in an auction that delay is fatal, because by the time a remote bidder sees the lot open, the floor has already moved on.

With Dolby OptiView, what happens on the auction floor reaches every connected device almost instantly, so online bidders compete on a genuinely level playing field with the room. A dedicated native iOS streamer app lets auction houses broadcast professional-grade live video straight from the floor — no outside-broadcast truck required. Real-time viewer statistics, scheduled broadcast management and stream-start imaging round out a televised-quality event toolkit.

Low-latency bidding that keeps pace with the room

A fast stream is only half the equation — the bid itself has to be just as fast. Meerkat’s bidding engine runs on persistent SignalR WebSocket connections, broadcasting every bid to every connected client, web and mobile, the instant it happens. No refreshing, no doubt about the current price.

• Live floor and app bidding working side by side in real time
• Auto-bidding (proxy bids) — set a maximum and let the system bid for you
• Pre-bids placed before a lot opens
• Smart, range-based bid increments that adjust the step size as the price climbs
• Instant outbid notifications so a buyer never misses the chance to come back in
• Grouped and master lots for competing on related lots together

Native Android and iOS apps — not web wrappers

Serious bidders bid from their phones, so we built true native mobile applications rather than shortcuts. On Android, Meerkat is a native Kotlin app with real-time SignalR bidding, integrated video playback, Firebase push notifications, in-app messaging and live crash reporting. On iOS, a native Swift app carries Dolby OptiView low-latency streaming built in, real-time bid participation, Apple push notifications and secure Keychain storage. Native means faster, smoother and more reliable — a streaming and bidding experience a web page wrapped in an app shell simply can’t match.

Modern Angular front ends

Meerkat’s web experiences are built on modern Angular: a bidding interface on Angular 16 with Angular Material, Tailwind CSS, NgRx state management and Transloco internationalisation for multi-language audiences; and a powerful admin and live-screen control centre for auctioneers and operators with broadcast management and real-time dashboards. Integrated Stripe payments, rich-text catalogue editing, interactive reporting, image lightboxes and Google Maps support complete the picture — every interface connected to the same SignalR backbone, so what you see is always current.

Built for the way auctions really work

• Multiple auction formats — live online, live-streamed, and automated timed auctions with staggered lot closing
• Rich lot management — reserve prices with warning thresholds, dynamic fields, multiple images, documents and video per lot, and specialist metadata (breed, age, weight) ideal for livestock and agricultural sales
• Bulk catalogue tools — import and export entire catalogues via Excel templates
• Multi-currency support for international buyers
• Registration and compliance — pre-registration workflows, document uploads, FICA/KYC tracking, bidder numbers, approval workflows and full audit logs
• Multi-channel notifications — push, SMS and email, plus watchlist alerts for favourite lots
• Built-in chat — real-time messaging between buyers, auctioneers and groups during a sale
• Comprehensive reporting — bid history, turnover and category analysis, streaming statistics and won-lot summaries

Enterprise-grade foundations

All of it runs on an ASP.NET Core (.NET 9) backend built on clean architecture principles, with Entity Framework Core on SQL Server, Azure SignalR for real-time messaging at scale, and a full Microsoft Azure deployment — App Services, Blob Storage, Service Bus and Notification Hubs — shipped through automated CI/CD pipelines. It’s the kind of architecture that lets an auction house run a high-volume, high-value sale knowing the platform won’t blink when it matters most.

The bottom line

Meerkat brings the energy and fairness of the live auction room to anyone, anywhere — real-time streaming, lightning-fast bidding, genuinely native mobile apps and a polished web experience. Whether the sale is livestock, specialty goods or high-value collectibles, Meerkat gives bidders the immediacy they expect and gives auction houses the tools to run it. It’s proof of what we do best: taking an ambitious idea and engineering it into a fast, reliable, market-leading platform.

Want us to build your next platform? Get in touch with the DankoSpark team — every engagement starts with a free 20-minute scoping call.