Automating Auction Intelligence for Oak and Cedar Trading

Oak and Cedar Trading sources antiques and vintage goods from regional online auctions across Ohio and the Midwest. Their team was spending hours each week manually checking half a dozen auction platforms for upcoming sales — opening tabs, scanning listings, and trying to keep track of what was closing when. They asked us if there was a better way.

There was.

The Problem

The auction sites Oak and Cedar monitors are all built on the same underlying platform (Auction Web Engine), which meant similar HTML structure across the board. But there was no unified feed, no API, and no way to subscribe to notifications across platforms. The only option was to check each site manually.

Six sites, checked several times a week, across a small team — that adds up fast.

The Solution: A Daily n8n Workflow

We built a workflow in n8n that runs automatically every morning at 6am. Here’s what happens:

1. Parallel Scraping

The workflow fires off six simultaneous HTTP requests to each auction platform:

NEO Auctions
Blazing Auctions
Rust Belt Revival
Great Lakes Vintage
Great Finds Auction
J&K Estate Sales

Each request fetches the homepage of that auction site, which lists all upcoming events.

2. HTML Extraction

For each site, an HTML extraction node pulls three pieces of data from the page:

Event ID — a data-eventid attribute on each listing div
Title — the auction event name
Date/Time — a data-initial-dttm attribute from the date element

Because all six sites share the same platform, the same CSS selectors work across all of them.

3. Transform and Filter

A short JavaScript node processes each site’s raw data:

Maps event IDs, titles, and dates into structured objects
Filters out any auctions that have already closed (comparing against the current timestamp)
Constructs a direct detail link for each upcoming auction
Tags each result with its source auction platform

4. Merge and Format

All six streams merge into a single node, then a formatter builds a clean HTML email. Auctions are grouped by platform, each with a linked title and closing date/time.

5. Deliver via Resend

The finished email goes out from [email protected] via Resend, arriving in the team’s inbox before the workday starts.

The Result

The Oak and Cedar team no longer checks auction sites manually. Their morning digest is waiting for them at 6am, organized by platform, showing only upcoming sales. They can scan the full week’s auction landscape in under a minute.

The workflow is fully templated — adding a new auction platform is as simple as copying an existing branch and updating the URL and site name.

If your business is spending time on repetitive data gathering like this, there’s likely a clean automation solution. Get in touch and we’ll take a look.