HiBid API & Scraper

The HiBid API returns North America's largest auction aggregator as clean JSON in six actions: search, detail, bids, auctions, houses and categories.

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HiBid holds no stock of its own — it is one shop window over thousands of independent auction houses — so the thing that makes this API useful is on every single row: auction_house, with the house's id, trading name, street, town, state, postcode, country, phone, e-mail and its own website, next to auction, with the sale's id, name, lot count, currency, location, buyer's premium and the HiBid links to the sale and its catalogue, and the lot's own URL. Measured on 2026-10-01 across 240 rows in each of two runs, those house fields were filled on 100 % of rows except the house's own website at 82.9 %, and a single 100-lot page touched 39 different auction houses. Because an auction is live, the bidding state comes with it: current_bid, bid_count, next_bid_amount, reserve_met, the normalised state (open or closed), HiBid's own status word, and closes_at — the lot's own closing instant in UTC, derived from the seconds HiBid publishes rather than from its printed timezone label, which was measurably wrong (100 of 107 rows said EST on a date when that zone was on daylight time). search offers ten filters that were each measured to move HiBid's own total in the same run, twelve stable sort orders, 1 to 100 lots a page, and a lot_ids parameter that returns up to 100 named lots in one call. One of those filters is worth calling out: HiBid's rows spell the country United States, but its own filter answers 21 lots for that spelling and only 2 for USA, with no error either way, so this API maps USA, US and America onto the spelling the rows use rather than passing them through. detail adds every picture, the category path root-first, the sale's complete terms — buyer's premium, bid increments, payment, shipping and pickup, preview and checkout dates, terms and conditions — and optionally the public bid ladder in the same call. bids returns that ladder on its own: each amount, how many bids landed on it, and the timestamp HiBid prints. auctions searches the sales rather than the lots, and is also how you work house by house, because HiBid publishes no auction-house filter on lots. houses is the directory itself. No HiBid account, no browser — one ReefAPI key and the standard { ok, data, meta, error } envelope.

{
  "method": "POST",
  "url": "https://api.reefapi.com/hibid/v1/search",
  "headers": {
    "x-api-key": "$REEF_KEY",
    "content-type": "application/json"
  },
  "body": {
    "query": "rolex",
    "max_results": 10
  }
}

{
  "ok": true,
  "meta": {
    "api": "hibid",
    "endpoint": "search",
    "mode": "live",
    "latency_ms": 804.4,
    "record_count": 10,
    "bytes": 42454,
    "cache_hit": false,
    "stop_reason": "limit_reached",
    "total_available": 572,
    "total_is_capped": false,
    "reachable_pages": 58,
    "duplicate_ids_in_page": 0,
    "distinct_auction_houses_in_page": 8,
    "currencies": {
      "USD": 10
    },
    "sort": "LOT_NUMBER",
    "charged_credits": 1,
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "request_id": "c547b7bbd17e4867",
    "queue_ms": 2.3
  },
  "data": {
    "query": "rolex",
    "status": "open",
    "archive": false,
    "sort": "lot_number",
    "filters": {
      "lot_type": "all",
      "category_id": null,
      "auction_id": null,
      "state": null,
      "country": null,
      "zip": null,
      "radius_miles": null,
      "lot_ids": null
    },
    "total_available": 572,
    "total_is_capped": false,
    "total_note": null,
    "page": 1,
    "page_count": 10,
    "last_reachable_page": 1000,
    "duplicate_ids_in_page": 0,
    "currencies": {
      "USD": 10
    },
    "auction_houses_in_page": [
      {
        "id": 148470,
        "name": "A&B Gemological Services"
      },
      {
        "id": 29322,
        "name": "Lilly's Auction & Gallery"
      },
      {
        "id": 90970,
        "name": "Garnet Gazelle"
      }
    ],
    "amounts_note": "Every amount is in that row's own `currency` as the auction house publishes it; nothing is converted.",
    "paging_note": "Rows are ordered by `sort`. hibid.com returns a random sample when no order is given, so this engine always sends one; measured repeat across three consecutive live pages was 0.33-0.67%, and 4.67% on the archive.",
    "__trimmed": "response capped for page display"
  }
}

curl -X POST https://api.reefapi.com/hibid/v1/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $REEF_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"rolex","max_results":10}'

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.reefapi.com/hibid/v1/search",
    headers={"x-api-key": REEF_KEY},
    json={
  "query": "rolex",
  "max_results": 10
},
)
print(r.json()["data"])

const res = await fetch("https://api.reefapi.com/hibid/v1/search", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "x-api-key": process.env.REEF_KEY,
    "content-type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
  "query": "rolex",
  "max_results": 10
}),
});
const { ok, data, meta, error } = await res.json();