I bought several joomla extensions in the past years, had my good surprises and my bad surprises.
For this extension i had high hopes, and i wasn't let down. I had no bad surprises at all, and i can even say the support is better then the average support offered by developers (and i am not talking only joomla extensions).
The extension works as described and as expected, all questions and issues i encountered i submitted per support ticket system and got answered.
Mainly this is a mature, well programmed and structurated extension with a pretty active community on the forums and a working support team.
I sure hope that the extension gets ported to Joomla 1.6, since i plan to expand my site portfolio next year.

Thanks and Regards,
Martin

Had implemented this solution for one of my clients. An auction site is pretty much work for and webdeveloper, and i spent some time with the system, so here is my experience with the extension:

Pros:
* VERY VERY VERY useful templating system. Ok, at first i was not so convinced, but after my customer started to change that bit, and that little thing, i was grateful for this feature!Saved me a lot of time
* Modular Payment gateway. They use a plugin concept for payment gateways. my customer needed some exotic payment system and with a little help from the support team i managed to add it to the site.
* a lot of configuration options. Many on/off features, that can be adjusted to your needs. I liked that.

Cons:
* Lack of fancy mootols widgets. There are a lot of new mootools plugins that i would have saluted to be implemented in this extension. At least as an option.
* no ajax on the frontend. Althou i can understand the compatibility problems that ajax sometimes carries with it, i would have liked something in this direction. I would trade some SEO advantages of non-ajax to the fancyness of ajax powered frontend.

Thanks to the support for all the help with the payment gateway, since i am not really php literate and had to add that option quick.

This product is no more than a glimpse at what a real Joomla auction product might look like when one is actually available for a production auction site.

Although it really does look nice, it's not really 1.5 Native, supports only one checkout system (PayPal), and to perform anything useful one needs to purchase the clunky commercial version of this product for 220 Euros at over 4 times the price of an actual production system you can trust w/serious sellers.

Our client wanted to implement a niche auction site w/Joomla and the lack of features that Auction Factory has at this time it's not likely that a real auction system capable of handling auctions w/most of the basic functions of checkouts and billing/accounts, shipping, administration, and feedback/dispute resolution, etc., is going to be available for at least a year.

Like I said, this product (and the commercial version of the product) are merely glmpses of what an actual Auction sytem for Joomla might look like when one is available some time from now.

What we ended up doing was wrapping phpuctionpro inside a Joomla install for our client, which provided a true commercial auction site after we built a utility to integrate the user registrtion databases w/some custom fields built w/Community Builder. The result is a fully blown auction site that is of commerical grade, with the auction portion costing 200 Dollars and then labor for the integration w/Joomla.

Our result wasn't Joomla 1.5 native, and the integration between the true auction system and Joomla is indeed patched together, but considering the only thing that Auction Factory was able to deliver was a very nice cosmetic look over an almost non-functional auction system we think we did pretty good.

I would really like to use this system if they would merely take the actual features of a real commercial auction system and implement them into their product.

The problem with Auction Factory is that even once they complete these very basic neccessities in their products, they still won't be competitive enough at the prices their asking for their commercial version to compete with the stand alone auction systems which can merely be wrapped and integrated with a CB database (You'll need CB in order to actually merge a single user registration regardless of what auction system you use).

On the bright side, this snippet of things to come in a year or so far exceeds, in my opinion, what the operational auction systems have in the way of cosmetics.

When Auction Factory releases a 1.5 Native (1.6 by then) version of their GPL product (the one being reviewed here) that will be the time that a developer can take their product and build a "basic" auction site that is native within Joomla. Even the folks at 'thefactory.ro' (the people who created Auction Factory) say that this GPL'd version is functional - it is only a skeleton for a developer to code and build a real auction site from, which means that you would have to reinvent the wheel because this is only really a demo of a working (and very limited) auction system that they provide for a large fee, and even then we found their support to be too limited, waiting on tickets, etc.

If you're running a club where everyone knows each other and is trusted, you meet regularly, etc., and can exchange the monies in person for your club's auctions, this version might work for you since you don't need any of the shipping and feedback and checkout systems all of the products - not just the GPL'd version here - are without.

For example, we have a client that is a Ham Radio club and are working on implementing this GPL'd version of Auction Factory on their club's Joomla site. But as I just pointed out, these are people who meet once a month, are local to each other, and can make deals based on a handshake, which is all that Auction Factory is really capable of sustaining at this time.

To sum it all up, this is a very beautiful looking auction system, and although it is only a glimpse of what an actually viable auction system is going to require for someone to adopt it, it shows very much promise and I am looking forward to this offering being an actual candidate for entry into the marketplace - since all those other auction wares have the same boring look to them, and this one has an extremely refreshing look and feel - go out and checkout the demo of this offering, you will be very impressed with the way it is laid out in a Joomla System.

Perhaps one of the best ways for the folks at 'thefactory.ro' to push this product is to finish with the 1.5 native integration, release the entire product with every feature and system that a real auction house operator is truly going to need to get people to register and use the auction site, and then charge monies for the checkout systems which must be supported - PayPal, GCO, RME, Authorize.net, Moneybookers, Nochex, Auctionchex, ProPay, 2Co, worldpay, etc., as these are the things an auction site must have in order to do business and attract sellers, and if Auction Factory had all of the Auction features and systems that a serious adopter of auction software needed they could rake in the big bucks for the checkout systems since everyone would truly want this product for their own website.

You guys have a very promising product, but it is certainly not ready for prime time and you released it way before the time where it's actually a viable offering in the auction software marketplace. Keep up the good work and I'll be one of your first customers when you finish building this product!

I tried all the auction scripts, commercial and non-commercial and this one was by far the most stable and flexible from all. Support is always active and always developing. Price may seem high, but for what they are offering is not much at all.

This soft is not native for Joomla 1.5. It is written for Joomla 1.0 and is supported with 1.5 in legacy mode. I installed it from a new Joomla 1.5, but it was not very stable from the beginning. Couple of bugs has been fast repaired. Templates are complex to use if you are not a programmer, and update scripts are also not very "easy" to use. You will need to use the forum to understand how it works ;-) There is no real update solution, only if you reinstall all (I've lost all my data the first time I installed a new version). The idea of this soft is good, support is sometime aggressive... Good point is people there take your ideas then integrate them in the soft.