I went to that gov planet auction site linked above. I then went to the shop eq section and there are a bunch of snap on toolboxes listed. Just scroll down.
https://www.govplanet.com/Shop,+Warehouse+&+Consumer
No idea how these auctions work. If somebody gets a deal let us know.
I too would love to hear from someone who's actually purchased something from this site...
I spent some time looking through the info available, and it appears to work similarly to (but not exactly like) eBay.
It appears to be all online (no in-person) bidding. There's a fixed auction time for each item (like a 2-hour window on a specific day), but you can pre-bid. You can enter a large bid and the software will incrementally raise bids by smaller amounts to keep you "just ahead" of other bidders (unless/until someone passes your large bid amount). The weird thing is that there appears to be a way that the system can extend the auction time window if bids are received near the end of the time limit.
As others have mentioned, you also have to pay taxes (unclear to me how much) and fees (15% for items under 10k). You have ** amount of time to pay and yy amount of time to pick up the item (or have a shipping company pick it up). Looks like you can request shipping quotes through them as well, but I don't know if you can do that before the sale.
Do I have all of that right?
Several tool boxes looked like they sold for OK deals, but not earth-shattering steals by any stretch of the imagination.
I did see that 2 different Terramite backhoes (prior rentals, clearly not government items) sold yesterday for between $9-10k. They were visually in great shape, but both had leaking transmissions, one had a leaking engine, and one had a leaking hydraulic valve.
These went for slightly less than a "hybrid" auction I watched recently (in-person, but with live online bidding), which sold two older small backhoes with more hours. (One of those was up on CL the next day for $2k more than it sold at the auction, clearly was just transported but had no service done to it in that amount of time, something to think about if buying from a dealer.)
Mike