origin does not have enough people to run a proper auction house, sorry to say it. A few deticated people there but not enough to drum up enough business for an auction house, nor is there enough buyers.
Then they should go visit Lake Austin and see how they manage to have auctions on a regular basis.
Lake Austin's action has a total of THREE staff, and does just fine if one of the three has to miss (as long as the one missing isn't the caller). Of course, it helps having a large alliance and all 3 of us being Guildleaders within the alliance.
Typically, we have about 10-20 people attending, only 3 or 4 from within the alliance -though if you have only 5-6 people that are your best customers, you can still run with it (just more selectively choose which items make it to the table, that are most likely to draw competing bids).
We don't have any internal bid-running incidents because if one of our alliance tries it, we'll kick them from the house, and probably their guild as well. Besides, as a rule, we price really low for our own stuff. A higher-than-market starting bid is something we only see from people submitting stuff from outside the alliance, and we usually try talking them down before submission.
I'm usually the Vendor cashier (the one that transfers the bought items to the vendor, and prices them, for the bid winners). When having to stick stuff on vendors to show the contents of a set, be sure that the vendor's set-up was hours outside normal vendor operations, and put an obscene price on the container for the showing (vendor penalties don't apply unless the item was on a vendor immediately before the auction). I typically go for 999999999 or 10000000.
The biggest pains are when people submit insured items, and they (or other staff) forget to uninsure the items before passing it to me to put on the vendor for pickup, or to show the container (especially the latter - going through a bag of thirty stealables for ONE insured item isn't fun).
You also should keep the purchase vendor at 840 gold. That's enough that you can skip a week without paying, but be able to withdraw the even 1000s from the vendor to settle the payouts, at a glance. always refill to 840 before the auction begins, and never have anything not free on the vendor during the week. And, I must reiterate - if you're going to have the auction at 9 PM through 11 PM, make sure the vendor was set up between 1 AM and 11 AM, so that you don't have a "vendor accident" (where you have something "show-priced" for a 100 million, to keep it from selling while people are examining it for bid, then the vendor makes its daily paycheck withdrawal based on that much being on it, or the value of the items awaiting checkout). Doing it in the AM hours allows one to have a special afternoon auction, if ever needed (in conjunction with a larger shard event, for example)
Also keep an eye out for bugged items that have vendor penalties that didn't expire (we had twenty or so Barbed kits like that), and remember that some items have rapid decay, so can't be shown on tables (some "newbied" items).
It helps having a Luna site for the auction. The tweenish-aged son of our alliance chief, by sheer accident, stumbled onto the burning rubble right by Luna gate, as it went way, and grabbed the house spot, while the usual IDOC & PvP guilds were all busy at champ spawns at the time.
If you don't have a Luna site willing to host, then you need to have a 4th auction staffer for the half-hour prior to the auction up to about 30 minutes prior to scheduled end, announcing and gating to the auction from Luna Bank (from WBB too, if that bank is still active, like on some of the large shards). We still had big crowds at our Luna wall, and arse-end-of-Malas wilderness locations, and the auctions we took over for had their sites in the Malas Mountain snowfields and outside Umbra (yes, from about the time the shard was founded in late 2002, until 2007, there were 2-3 auctions a week on LA - and they had crowds then that dwarfed ours - no pun intended, given that one was surrounded by the clan that role-played Dwarves, and their mountain city that covered most the snowfield areas).
On a typical auction night we'll run about 60-100 items, and bring in gross sales of 30-50 million gold. The irony is that rarely do we have high-price (over 10 million gold) items, as they don't tend to sell well unless in high demand. Example, we have trouble selling a 120 Magery scroll at about a million under market price for the opening bid, but at the same time, I brought in a Ghost Ship anchor (much more rarer), started the bidding at 6 million, and it sold for 10.5 million. Similarly, there was a 2 month stretch after the end of ToT III where the new 1-use dyes were selling for 50-250k each, by color, but that eventually dropped off to unsellable at auction, from the people wanting specific colors getting all they needed. You really have to know your bidders and their wants.
Along that line, make sure you have a list of what items are potentially up for bid (but not the starting bids) posted on your shard's page at least a few hours before the auction, and ask people before the event starts to look at the list, and suggest items for you to run. Run some lower end stuff for the first 5 or so items, to give late arrivals time to show up, before running the requested items about every second or third item from there.
Having a Spreadsheet for the items is always handy too - usually kept by the box-rummager (the one that doesn't do the bid calling or the vendor loading, but pulls out the items to sell). each time an item sells, put in the sell price, and save the spreadsheet to keep from losing data. You can then, of course, also use the spreadsheet to add the columns for taking in stuff, as well as calculating the auction fees (if any - on LA we don't charge fees to the people selling stuff, as we typically have 1/3 our own stuff in the auction, and are making enough profit from our own sales. Some of the previous auction groups charged 5-10%). Record the sale data from sold items in both the spreadsheet, and in the book that was in the bag with the item. (see below).
Proper Auction item acceptance etiquette will have the seller provide each sale lot in its own bag, with a book in the bag with the seller's name, minimum bid for the item, and optionally their contact info if you don't know them). Only for special items, consider taking new items in on the day of the auction. This allows the auction to take the time to fill out the afore-mentioned spreadsheet beforehand with the info in the books, and sort the containers behind the bar. Sold items have their books set aside by the box-rummager, to check against the spreadsheet after the event ends. non-sold items are put back into their submission bag and returned to the chest to be run again at a later time, or for the seller to reclaim (if desired).
