NEW YORK, NY.- Manhattan-based LiveAuctioneers, the online marketplace of choice for the most knowledgeable art, jewelry and collectibles buyers throughout 47 countries, has released Q1 results confirming a strong, continued leadership position in the global marketplace.

More than 31,000 new bidders joined the LiveAuctioneers community during the first quarter. Importantly, new-bidder purchases were up 36% over last year’s Q1 numbers, and items sold reflected double-digit growth over the comparable quarter of 2016. Senior Vice President of Product and Marketing, Phil Michaelson, said, “With the highest average order size and the highest sell-through in the industry, LiveAuctioneers proved again that auction houses that are not online with LiveAuctioneers are doing a disservice to their consignors.”

A recognized technology pioneer, LiveAuctioneers was the first company in its sector to develop mobile apps, employ video streaming and push actively into search engine optimization for the benefit of its auction-house clients. To this day, LiveAuctioneers remains the only platform in the online-auction industry to offer Android users a mobile-app option. During Q1, there was 40% year-over-year growth in mobile-bidding sessions across mobile web, iOS and Android apps.

LiveAuctioneers’ world-class engineering team both adopted and created cutting-edge technologies in Q1 that resulted in new features which allow site visitors to sort any auction catalog by highest or lowest-priced lot, highest or lowest estimate, or lots that currently have the most or least bids. With the new layout of LiveAuctioneers’ auctioneer-profile page, bidders also have a more efficient way to view current and past auctions of interest, while the new directory enables bidders to find any auction house either alphabetically or by geographic location. For greater social media exposure, “sharing” buttons were optimized on all catalog-lot pages, which resulted in dramatic increases in shares to Facebook (286%), Twitter (208%) and Pinterest (144%).

LiveAuctioneers’ popular price results database, which is widely regarded as the most accurate and up-to-date source for prices realized on art, antiques and vintage collectibles continued its pattern of buoyant growth. In Q1, another 1.8 million records were added to the database.

“All of these factors created a synergy that drove our first-quarter sales to new heights, increasing 43.2% over that of last year’s first quarter,” Michaelson said.

The back-end user experience was enhanced for auction houses, as well. “Images are critical to attracting bidders and motivating them to sign up for an auction or leave an online absentee bid, but uploading images can be a time-consuming process for auctioneers,” said Michaelson. “We set a goal to reduce the upload time and ended up far surpassing our own expectations. Our new system enables auctioneers to upload 25,000 images in less than two minutes, which saves staff hours over other online marketing avenues. Also, this system optimizes the images for web and mobile browsing, thus minimizing the download speed, which is especially important for growing sales from mobile bidders.”

In Q1, LiveAuctioneers was recognized yet again for its unique office culture that aligns high performance with a great work environment. Only months after being selected as one of Red Herring’s Top 100 North American Companies, LiveAuctioneers was named one of New York City’s “Best Places to Work” by Crain’s New York Business.