Exporting an AI Auction Catalog to HiBid, Step by Step

Once Gavelist has cataloged your lots, getting them into HiBid is a five-minute export, not a copy-paste marathon. You pick the HiBid format, choose what to include, and download a file HiBid imports directly — titles, descriptions, and photos intact. Here's the whole path, start to finish.

1. Open the Export Catalog page. Once your lots are described, the export screen opens on your totals — how many lots, how many you've reviewed, how many carry descriptions. You see exactly what's about to go out the door before you send it.

2. Pick HiBid as your format. Gavelist exports to every major marketplace — HiBid, LiveAuctioneers, AuctionZip, Proxibid, BidWrangler, and eBay — plus a generic CSV. Choose HiBid and the file is built to HiBid's own import spec, not a generic dump you have to reformat by hand.

3. Set your options. Full images or thumbnails, and the lot range — every lot, or a custom span. You can also hold the export to reviewed lots only, or to lots that already have descriptions, so a half-finished sale still exports clean.

4. Read the sample. Gavelist shows you the first few rows — lot number, title, description — before you commit to the whole file. If the sample comes back short, set the range back to All Lots. This is the step that catches a bad export before it's live, not after a bidder emails you about lot 214.

5. Download the CSV, or pull the ZIP. Descriptions alone come down as a CSV. To send images with the data, export the ZIP — Gavelist builds it (Building Export… ZIP Export Ready) and hands you the file.

6. Load it into HiBid. Import the file into your HiBid catalog and the lots land with titles, descriptions, and photos already in place.

That's the export. The real time savings land a step earlier — according to Estimint's cataloging analysis, a 200-lot sale runs 46–64 hours to catalog by hand, and according to AIM (2025), manual work moves at 15–25 lots an hour, and according to AuctionWriter's own estate-fees analysis (2025), that cataloging labor runs $25–$45 per hour per crew member; Gavelist writes 500 lots in about 10 minutes from photos. But the export is what makes that usable on sale day: no retyping, no reformatting, no platform lock-in. One cost worth keeping straight while you're here: HiBid's AuctionFlex 360 charges an online bidding fee of 2% of gross proceeds. That's a bidding-platform fee on your sales, a separate line from cataloging entirely. Gavelist charges $0.15 a lot to catalog and takes 0% of what you sell.

Watch the full walkthrough: HiBid export tutorial. See the full integration: HiBid integration · all integrations.