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Choosing which pages appear in your auction's navigation

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With the Auctions app, each auction has its own navigation menu, and you decide what goes in it. You can point bidders at your donation page, tell them where the event is being held, thank your sponsors, and answer the questions your team gets asked every year — without building any of it in the Menu Manager.

These settings live on the auction itself, so two auctions on the same site can offer different menus.

To set them:

  1. Open the Auctions Manager.
  2. Click the title of the auction you want to manage.
  3. Click the Menu & Pages tab.
  4. Set each item as described below.
  5. Click Save.

Browse Items

For Show Browse Items Menu Item, select Yes to give bidders a link back to the full item grid from anywhere in the auction.

Worth leaving on for most auctions — it is the way back to browsing once someone has followed a link into a single item.

Donate

For Show Donate Menu Item, select Yes to add a Donate link, then for Donations App Page, click Select and choose the published Donations page to use. The field shows None until you pick one.

Bidders who click Donate get the donation form without leaving the auction — it opens over the page they were on, so they are not navigated away mid-auction.

Important: The Donate item needs both halves. If Show Donate Menu Item is Yes but no Donations page has been selected, the item does not appear at all. If Donate is missing from your live auction, check the page selection before anything else.

Event Info

For Show Event Info Menu Item, select Yes, then use Event Info Page Content to write the page.

This is a full editor, so put whatever your guests ask about in it: venue and address, parking, dress code, timings, table assignments, who to call on the night.

Sponsors

For Show Sponsors Menu Item, select Yes to add a link to your auction's Sponsors page.

The Sponsors link also needs Sponsors set to Yes under What's in this auction on the auction's Details tab. If either one is No, the link does not appear. See Choosing what's in an auction.

Important: Setting Sponsors to No under What's in this auction also sets Show Sponsors Menu Item to No. Setting Sponsors back to Yes does not turn the menu item back on. Return to the Menu & Pages tab, set Show Sponsors Menu Item to Yes, and click Save.

You can set Sponsors to No only while the auction has no sponsors or sponsor levels.

The page itself is built from the sponsors and levels on the auction's own tabs — see Where your sponsors appear.

Help

For Show Help Menu Item, select Yes, then use Help Page Content to write the page.

The most useful thing to put here is the answer to whatever your team spent last year's event explaining — how proxy bidding works, when payment is taken, how items are collected.

When the menu disappears entirely

If every item is set to No, the navigation menu is hidden completely rather than shown empty. The same happens when the only items set to Yes cannot appear — Donate with no page selected, or Sponsors in an auction where Sponsors is No under What's in this auction.

That is deliberate, and it is the usual explanation when an auction appears to have no menu at all. Turn one item on and it comes back.

When the auction has no items

If People Bid on Items and Items Sold at a Set Price are both No under What's in this auction, the auction has nothing to browse. Instead of the item grid, the auction home page shows a landing page built from the settings on this tab.

The landing page shows these sections, in this order:

Section Appears when
Event Info Show Event Info Menu Item is Yes and Event Info Page Content contains text
Donate button Show Donate Menu Item is Yes and a Donations App Page is selected
Sponsors, grouped by level Show Sponsors Menu Item is Yes, Sponsors is Yes under What's in this auction, and the auction has at least one published sponsor level
Help Show Help Menu Item is Yes and Help Page Content contains text

Any section that does not qualify is left out. Search, Filter, Sort, the Items count and the Official Time clock do not appear on the landing page.

Note: Event Info or Help content that is only an image, with no text, counts as empty, and the section is left out. If no section qualifies, guests see the auction header and nothing below it, so turn on at least one of these before you share the auction.

What is not controlled here

Favorites, My Preferences and My Checkout in the bidder's own account menu are always available to signed-in bidders and are not affected by these settings.

My Bids and My Orders depend on what the auction includes, set under What's in this auction on the Details tab:

  • My Bids appears only when People Bid on Items is Yes.
  • My Orders appears only when Items Sold at a Set Price is Yes, or when any Silent Bidding item in the auction has a Buy Now Price.

Nor is this the same as the menu item that gets people to the auction in the first place. That is built in the Menu Manager — see Linking to Auctions on the front end.

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