Sure! About two months ago I was cruising around the web looking for an e-commerce solution for the Houston Antique Source. I'm going to be trying to build a local community on there so I wanted to have a platform multiple people could sell items on. None of the regular shopping carts I could find really supported this feature well, if at all.

I ended up looking for auction software because that is the closest thing to a 'group marketplace' that I could find that would fit my needs. There are two price points for auction software I learned : Free and Thou$ands. Out of the free group I found 3 different prospects:

1. PHPAuction : Looks terrible, doesn't work well and is difficult to Mod.
2. EveryAuction: Written in a difficult language I don't know (Perl), extremely difficult and complex to install ( and no longer supported by anyone).
3. Kaqoo: What I chose to power Instant Online Auctions.

Kaqoo had a couple things going for it that I liked:

1. The appearance and look is fully customizeable.
2. There is a central 'hub' that all the listings go through. This means that if you search for 'Antiques' at Houston Antique Source, you will see all of the Antiques listed on a site running Kaqoo Software. This is huge for sites that don't have thousands of visitors a day.
3. Even though the software is run from a central place, you still have an installation on your web host and you choose all of the settings: fees, allowed categories, etc.
4. The only cut that Kaqoo takes is 20% of any fees that you decide to collect. I think this is pretty reasonable considering the quality of the application.
5. All of the settings and the listing process would be familiar to an Ebay user, making the learning curve for adoption low.

However, Kaqoo has one little hitch. You have to basically know your way around owning a hosted web site in order to do the install. With Instant Online Auctions, I'm taking all of the technical steps out of the process.

1. I Install the software and get them a username and password. (which they can obviously change).
2. I provide the space and the bandwidth to host the site. (Kaqoo doesn't take tons of space and if you only want to run a auction site, paying even $3.95 a month is ripping you off for the amount you would use)
3. I allow you to register your domain.

End Result:

Instead of spending a week trying to get Kaqoo to work and giving up frustratedly because of web hosting or installation issues, I have reduced hosting an online auction to the lowest common denominator - storage, domain, bandwidth, software - All in One.