Interesting concept, but from what I know of Airtable I think the functionality is going to be too limited to trust with real money bids. If you're building something for like a classroom to teach principals it might work well enough though.

I might suggest an "Auctions" table in addition to "Items" and "Bids" that allows you to express more detail. I could see it being easy enough to create a flow adding a date/time to the auction with a duration field, then a formula field calculating the end time with either a view or automation that removes the auction from availability at end time.

I'd definitely look at one of the 3rd party form integrations, like Fillout, to handle the biddings. It should be able to document submission created time to use as a bid time flag. You might be able to use Fillout to handle recognizing bidders too, in Airtable proper the only way you're going to do that is with logged in Airtable accounts, which is onerous and also gets pricey giving people seats.

Interesting concept, but from what I know of Airtable I think the functionality is going to be too limited to trust with real money bids. If you're building something for like a classroom to teach principals it might work well enough though.

I might suggest an "Auctions" table in addition to "Items" and "Bids" that allows you to express more detail. I could see it being easy enough to create a flow adding a date/time to the auction with a duration field, then a formula field calculating the end time with either a view or automation that removes the auction from availability at end time.

I'd definitely look at one of the 3rd party form integrations, like Fillout, to handle the biddings. It should be able to document submission created time to use as a bid time flag. You might be able to use Fillout to handle recognizing bidders too, in Airtable proper the only way you're going to do that is with logged in Airtable accounts, which is onerous and also gets pricey giving people seats.

Hmm, all your users would need to have read-only access (and thus need to create free Airtable accounts) in order to view the real time updates.  This ties in to your user identification issue; assuming you're doing this with an Airtable form, you can toggle on a setting that'll let you see who submitted the form

You mention preventing duplicate bids, could you talk more about that?  Is it a worry of someone bidding the same amount twice in quick succession?

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re: preventing race conditions with simultaneous bids?

Hmm, I think this depends on the logic that you want actually.  A possible simple version of this would involve just taking the largest bid, regardless of the submission time.  If two bids with the exact same amount come in you can compare the tsubmission times down to the millisecond, so you'd be able to figure out whose to use from there too