Running Auctions in Odoo with Atreus: Sealed Bid, Dutch, English & More via API

You can run Sealed Bid, Forward English, Reverse English, Dutch, Hybrid Dutch, and Texas auctions directly from within your Odoo ERP by integrating Odoo with the Atreus.auction platform through the public API at https://auctions-api.atreus.auction/. This is a custom integration service delivered by the Atreus team — contact us to scope your project.

Why Combine Odoo with Atreus.auction?

Odoo is one of the world's most widely deployed open-source ERP and business suites, covering CRM, Sales, Inventory, Purchase, Accounting, Manufacturing, and e-commerce in a single platform. What Odoo does not provide out of the box is a production-grade, real-time online auction engine that supports complex, multi-stage bidding scenarios.

Atreus fills exactly that gap.

Atreus is an Auction-as-a-Service (AaaS) platform built on top of the same open-source auction engine that powers ProZorro and ProZorro.Sale — the national e-procurement and asset-sale systems of Ukraine. The engine has processed millions of auctions, including $3.53B+ in savings through reverse procurement auctions and $279M+ in revenue through Hybrid Dutch asset-disposal auctions (2015–2019 figures).

By connecting Odoo to Atreus through the API, you get the full business process management of Odoo plus battle-tested online auction functionality, all in a single workflow.

How Does the Odoo + Atreus Integration Work?

The integration is built around the Atreus Auctions API available at:

https://auctions-api.atreus.auction/

At a high level, the flow is straightforward:

1. Data stays in Odoo. Products, customers (bidders), starting prices, reserve prices, documents, and auction rules are all managed as Odoo records — using your existing models (product.product, res.partner, sale.order, purchase.order, etc.) and any custom fields your business needs.
2. Odoo calls the Atreus API. When a user clicks "Start Auction" inside Odoo, a custom Odoo module sends the auction payload (type, lot, start time, minimal step, bidder list) to auctions-api.atreus.auction. Atreus creates the auction and returns an auction ID and bidder invitation links.
3. The auction runs on Atreus. Bidders participate through the Atreus bidding interface (or your own white-labeled UI connected to the same API). Real-time bidding, timers, rounds, and anti-sniping logic are all handled by the Atreus engine.
4. Results flow back to Odoo. Once the auction closes, Odoo fetches the final results via API — the winner, winning bid, full bidding history — and automatically creates the corresponding sales order, purchase order, invoice, or contract inside Odoo.

Because Atreus is API-first, the connector can be embedded anywhere in Odoo: on a product form, a sales quotation, a purchase RFQ, a project task, or a dedicated "Auctions" app in the Odoo menu.

Sealed Bid Auction with Odoo and Atreus

The Sealed Bid auction is a single-round format where every participant submits one confidential bid without seeing the bids of others. When the submission window closes, all bids are revealed simultaneously and the best bid (highest for a sale, lowest for a procurement) wins.

When should you use a Sealed Bid auction?

Sealed Bid is the right choice when:

• You need one clean, confidential offer per participant (common in government tenders, M&A processes, real-estate disposals, and NPL sales).
• You want to prevent price signaling between bidders during the bidding window.
• You need a fast, low-overhead auction with no live rounds, timers, or bidding wars.
• You are running the middle stage of a Hybrid Dutch auction — in that format, Sealed Bid is sandwiched between the descending Dutch phase and the final Best Price phase.

How Sealed Bid runs end-to-end inside Odoo

A typical Sealed Bid workflow with the Odoo ⇄ Atreus integration looks like this:

1. Create the lot in Odoo. Add the product, service, or asset as an Odoo record. Attach documents (tender specs, due-diligence files, asset photos) using Odoo Documents.
2. Configure the auction. In the Atreus integration view, pick Sealed Bid as the auction type, set the submission window, the reserve price, and the qualified bidder list (pulled from Odoo contacts).
3. Invite bidders. The Atreus API generates unique invitation links; Odoo mails them via its native email engine, CRM workflow, or a marketing automation flow.
4. Bidders submit confidential bids through Atreus. Bids are encrypted until the window closes.
5. Atreus reveals bids and determines the winner at the scheduled close time.
6. Odoo ingests the result — the winning bidder is automatically linked to a sale.order (or purchase.order for procurement), the winning price is transferred, and downstream accounting and fulfillment flows trigger as usual.

Because all business logic (contract terms, VAT, invoicing, delivery, customer history) already lives in Odoo, the sealed-bid process is a thin auction layer on top of your existing ERP — not a parallel system you have to maintain.

Other Auction Types You Can Run in Odoo via Atreus

Sealed Bid is only one of several formats supported by the integration. Atreus offers a complete suite of auction types, all accessible through the same API.

Forward English Auction (Ascending)

The classic online auction: bidders openly raise each other's offers until the time runs out and the highest bid wins. This is the most widely recognized format and is well-suited for:

• E-commerce sales of scarce or premium stock
• Collectibles and art
• Auctioning excess inventory straight from Odoo Inventory

Inside Odoo, a Forward English auction typically starts from a product's "minimum sale price" field and escalates in increments set by your Odoo pricing rules.

Reverse English Auction (Procurement)

In a Reverse English auction, the buyer is the auctioneer and suppliers compete by lowering their prices across three rounds. The lowest qualifying bid wins. This is the engine behind the ProZorro public procurement system, which has saved over $3.53 billion across 4.11 million auctions (2015–2019).

In Odoo, this format pairs naturally with the Purchase app: you turn a standard RFQ into a live reverse auction and the winning supplier's quotation is automatically confirmed as a Purchase Order.

Best applications:

1. Replacing manual market research — suppliers come to you and compete on price.
2. E-procurement and tendering that must be transparent and audit-ready.
3. Discovering the real price of a product or service, free of hidden margins.

Dutch Auction (Descending)

In a Dutch auction, the price starts high and decreases over time. The first bidder to accept wins. This format is ideal when you need a fast sale or want to discover the market-clearing price quickly — often used for perishable goods, time-sensitive inventory, or IPO-style allocations.

Hybrid Dutch Auction (Insider Auction)

The Hybrid Dutch — sometimes called the Insider auction — is a three-stage format that combines the best properties of Dutch, Sealed Bid, and Best Price auctions:

1. Dutch phase: the price descends automatically from 100% to 20% in 80 steps of -1%, with short pauses between steps. The first bidder to accept stops this phase.
2. Sealed Bid phase: remaining bidders submit one confidential bid each, above the Dutch-phase stopping price.
3. Best Price phase: the top bidders go head-to-head in a final round to set the winning price.

This was the format used for Deposit Guarantee Fund (DGF) non-performing loan disposals inside ProZorro.Sale. It generated $279M+ in revenue across 47.34M conducted auctions (2018–2019) and is suited for:

• Non-performing loans (NPLs)
• Mineral extraction rights
• Commercial asset sales
• Small privatization
• Property leases
• Railcar leases

Texas Auction

A Texas auction is close in spirit to a Sotheby's live auction: bidding starts at a seller-announced price and continues until only one bidder remains willing to take the lot. It fits property leases, art sales, and premium-asset disposal that needs a "last one standing" dynamic.

What You Get with the Odoo + Atreus Custom Integration

When you combine Odoo's ERP capabilities with Atreus auctions, you end up with a system that includes:

• Full Odoo functionality — CRM, Sales, Purchase, Inventory, Accounting, Projects, Manufacturing, e-commerce, and every other Odoo app your business already uses.
• Six production-grade auction types — Sealed Bid, Forward English, Reverse English, Dutch, Hybrid Dutch, and Texas.
• Real-time bidding infrastructure — hosted on AWS with elastic capacity for spikes in auction volume.
• API-first architecture — anything Atreus does can be triggered from Odoo workflows, scheduled actions, or server actions.
• Single source of truth — bidders are Odoo contacts, lots are Odoo products or assets, results are Odoo sales/purchase orders. No duplicate data, no CSV imports.
• Custom rules and branding — because both Odoo and Atreus support deep customization, you can mix and match auction types, custom business logic, and your own branded bidder UI.

This Is a Custom Service — Contact Us to Scope Your Project

The Odoo ⇄ Atreus integration is not an off-the-shelf plugin on the Odoo App Store. It is a custom integration service delivered by the Atreus team, tailored to your Odoo version (community or enterprise), your specific auction rules, and your downstream workflows.

A typical engagement includes:

• Discovery and requirements workshop
• Mapping of Odoo models to Atreus auction entities
• Development of the custom Odoo module / connector
• Configuration of the chosen auction types
• Staging, UAT, and production rollout
• Post-launch support and evolution

To discuss whether Odoo + Atreus is the right fit for your business — or to request a demo of any specific auction type — please reach out via the contact form on atreus.auction.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Odoo run an auction natively?

No. Odoo does not include a real-time auction engine in its standard apps. To run Sealed Bid, English, Reverse, Dutch, Hybrid Dutch, or Texas auctions from Odoo, you need to integrate it with an auction platform like Atreus through the public API at https://auctions-api.atreus.auction/.

What is a Sealed Bid auction?

A Sealed Bid auction is a single-round auction format where each participant submits one confidential bid without seeing the bids of others. When the submission window closes, all bids are revealed and the best one wins. It is widely used in tenders, M&A, real-estate disposal, and NPL sales.

How does the Atreus API connect to Odoo?

A custom Odoo module (developed by the Atreus team as part of the integration engagement) makes authenticated HTTPS calls to https://auctions-api.atreus.auction/ to create auctions, invite bidders, monitor status, and fetch results. The data in Odoo — products, contacts, orders — is used as the source of truth for every auction.

Which auction types are supported?

Six types: Sealed Bid, Forward English, Reverse English, Dutch, Hybrid Dutch (three-stage Dutch + Sealed Bid + Best Price), and Texas. They can all be triggered from inside Odoo via the same API.

Is Odoo + Atreus integration available as a ready-made app?

No. It is a custom service. The Atreus team builds the connector, configures it to match your auction rules and Odoo setup, and supports it after launch. Get in touch to scope your integration.

Who uses the Atreus auction engine today?

The engine behind Atreus powers ProZorro (Ukrainian public e-procurement) and ProZorro.Sale (state asset and NPL sales). Cumulatively, the platform has processed over 4 million reverse auctions, saved $3.53B+ through reverse procurement, and generated $279M+ through Hybrid Dutch auctions (2015–2019). It is also used by private operators such as Rhenium Capital (USA) via exchange.loans and outdoor-advertising auction operators.

Can I run auctions without integrating Odoo?

Yes. Atreus works standalone — you can create and run any of the six auction types directly on atreus.auction without any external system. The Odoo integration is for teams that want auctions to be a native part of their ERP workflow rather than a separate tool.

Next Steps

1. Try Atreus standalone. Create a free test auction at atreus.auction to experience each auction type.
2. Review the auction types above and identify which ones fit your business model (sales, procurement, asset disposal, or a combination).
3. Contact the Atreus team to discuss a custom Odoo integration tailored to your workflows.

Running auctions should not mean swivel-chairing between your ERP and a separate bidding tool. With Odoo + Atreus, auctions become a first-class citizen of your business process — and the business impact is measured in Odoo, where it belongs.