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Before a customer can place a bid, you — the tenant admin — need to turn bidding on at the tenant level, enable specific scopes and pricing rules on each lead type, and decide which cap/budget controls customers should see. This guide walks through those switches end-to-end. For how bidding actually resolves auctions (smart pricing, positions, status rollups), see the Bidding feature page. For the customer-side UI, see the Bids page in the customer portal reference.

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Prerequisites

  • Admin role access to your tenant.
  • At least one lead type configured. Bidding rules are per-lead-type, so you can’t open auctions without one.
  • A sense of pricing — what’s the minimum you’d accept for a lead? The maximum? What’s a reasonable step increment?

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Step 1: Open the Bidding settings page

Click Settings in the left sidebar (gear icon near the bottom), then Bidding. The page lives at /manage/<tenant>/bid-settings and groups four sections down the page: Global Bid Settings, Customer Bidding Access, Lead Cap Settings, and Budget Settings. Each section has its own Update button — saving one doesn’t commit the others.

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Step 2: Configure global bid settings

The first section — Global Bid Settings — controls whether customers can bid at all: Leave it off for normal operation. Flip it on when you’re migrating platforms, pausing operations, or running a fully tenant-managed pricing model. Click Update bid settings to save.

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Step 3: Configure customer bidding access

The Customer Bidding Access section decides who can even see the bidding UI:
If you don’t want bidding gated at all, uncheck Can access bidding on individual customers as needed, and leave this section’s defaults alone. The threshold plus modal is the right tool when you have a consistent policy (e.g., “must deposit $500 before bidding”).
Click Update bidding access settings to save.

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Step 4: Decide which lead caps are available

Scroll to Lead Cap Settings. Each toggle here controls whether that cap type is available to customers as a form field. Turning one off hides it from the customer bid form and the customer’s account settings — existing caps aren’t enforced, but new ones can’t be set. The usual pattern is to enable monthly and daily (weekly rarely matters), but this is a product decision — enable whatever your customers will actually use. Click Update lead cap settings to save.

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Step 5: Decide which budgets are available

Budget Settings mirrors the cap section, but for dollar amounts instead of lead counts: Budgets and caps are independent — a bid stops on whichever hits first. See Budgets and caps for the full interaction model. Click Update budget settings to save.

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Step 6: Enable scopes on each lead type

Tenant settings are done; now move to the per-lead-type bidding configuration. Navigate to Lead Types in the sidebar, click a lead type, then click the Bidding tab (/manage/<tenant>/lead-types/<lead-type>/bidding-settings). The tab shows a table of bidding scopes that currently exist on this lead type. By default, a new lead type has none — which means customers can’t bid on it yet. Click New bidding scope in the top-right. The modal has five fields: Click Create. The scope appears in the table. Repeat for each scope you want to open (county, state, nationwide).
A scope row’s existence is what makes that scope available to customers. If your lead type only has a County row, customers can only place county-level bids — the state and nationwide options are hidden from the bid form entirely.

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Step 7: Set per-customer bidding limits (optional)

If a specific customer needs a tighter cap or budget than the default, set it on the customer rather than the tenant. Navigate to Customers → pick a customer → Bids tab (/manage/<tenant>/customers/<customer>/bids). The top-right has a Bidding Limits action that opens a form with the enabled caps/budgets from Step 4 and 5 — per-bid limits are attached to individual bids, and account-level limits apply across all of that customer’s bids. This is also where you’ll see the customer’s existing bids and can create, edit, pause, or delete bids on their behalf (useful when Disable all customer bidding is on, or for hands-on account management).

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Step 8: Verify a customer can bid

Log in as a test customer (or use an impersonation flow if your tenant has one). The customer’s left sidebar should show Bids. Clicking it opens the bid table; clicking Create Bid opens the bid form. If the bid form shows:
  • The lead types you expect
  • The scopes you expect for each lead type
  • The price ranges you configured
  • Cap/budget fields matching what you enabled
…you’re good. If something’s missing, double-check the lead type’s Bidding tab — 90% of “I can’t see my lead type” issues trace back to a missing scope row there.

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What happens next

Once bidding is open:
  • Customers place bids through the customer portal. They pick a location, a lead type, and an amount within your min/max/step rules. See the Bids page for the full customer walkthrough.
  • Auctions resolve in real-time when matching leads arrive. The highest eligible bid wins, with smart pricing applied so the winner only pays one increment above the runner-up.
  • Statuses cascade — bids reflect their own health (Active / Paused / Limited / Exhausted / Under Funded / Capped), so customers can debug why they’re not winning by reading the status column.
  • Distribution Stages control how bids compete with other distribution methods. If you’ve enabled Distribution Stages, make sure your Highest Price stage has Enable Bids turned on, otherwise your carefully-configured bids never enter the auction.
The full pipeline is: tenant enables bidding → you configure scopes and pricing → customer funds their wallet (Managing customer finances) → customer places bids → leads flow in and auctions resolve. From here, natural next steps are Adding a partner rotation for non-auction fallbacks, or Configuring distribution stages if you want a multi-stage pipeline.