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.
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?
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.
The first section — Global Bid Settings — controls whether customers can bid at all:
| Field | What it does |
|---|
| Disable all customer bidding | Kill switch. When enabled, no customer can create or edit bids via the customer portal. Only tenant admins can modify bids (from the customer detail page → Bids tab). |
| Field | What it does |
|---|
| Minimum deposit for auto-access | The deposit threshold. Once a customer’s lifetime deposits hit this amount, they automatically get bidding access. Leave blank to require you to grant access manually. |
| Modal Subject | Heading on the access-restricted modal a customer sees before they’ve earned access. Defaults to a generic message if left blank. |
| Modal Body | Longer explanation on the same modal. Good place to say “Schedule an onboarding call first” or link to your requirements. |
| Button Text | Label on the call-to-action button in the modal. |
| Button Link URL | URL the button opens. Common patterns: a Calendly link, your sales form, or your Terms page. |
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”).
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.
| Toggle | Scope |
|---|
| Bid Daily / Weekly / Monthly Lead Caps | Per-bid caps on number of leads won (resets each period). |
| Account Daily / Weekly / Monthly Lead Caps | Customer-level caps applied across all bids. |
Step 5: Decide which budgets are available
Budget Settings mirrors the cap section, but for dollar amounts instead of lead counts:
| Toggle | Scope |
|---|
| Bid Daily / Weekly / Monthly Budgets | Per-bid dollar caps (resets each period). |
| Account Daily / Weekly / Monthly Budgets | Customer-level dollar caps across all bids. |
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:
| Field | Notes |
|---|
| Scope | Required. Pick County, State, or Nationwide. Each scope is a separate row, so a lead type can support all three by creating three entries. |
| Enabled | Toggle. Leave on unless you want to prep a scope but not open it yet. |
| Fixed Price | Toggle. If on, customers pay a set price (no competing) — the form collapses to just one Price field. If off (the default), it’s a range-based auction with minimum, maximum, and step. |
| Minimum / Price | Required. The floor bid (or the only price if fixed). Validation enforces that it’s less than or equal to Maximum. |
| Maximum | Required for range pricing. The ceiling bid. Hidden when Fixed Price is on. |
| Step | Required for range pricing. The increment between valid bid amounts — e.g., step 5.00 means customers can bid $10, $15, $20… but not $12. Hidden when Fixed Price is on. |
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.
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).
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.
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. 
