BiddingOwl.com Reviews

Ease of sharing website with bidders and user friendly bidding
Great advertising inserts for donors
Extremely helpful customer support

Cheaper fees
Website creation and pulling out can be labor intense
Bids sheets and certificates templates could be a little fancier

We don't do many auction based fundraisers throughout the year, but we still always dread them as they approach. That is, we did, before finding biddingowl.com. Gone are the nightmares of using a paper-based auction system that we spent oodles of time organizing, tracking, reconciling, etc. Bidding Owl makes it easier for us to organize, but also for our users to engage in the auction. With tools like the 'auto bid up to a certain amount', people are more willing to spend money, meaning we raise more.

It's not the most visually appealing software on the market. Granted, we haven't used other auction tools specifically, but the ui / visual design of the software just feels a bit dated. Like early 2000s look. Design trends across the industry have moved on, and there's little excuse these days for not having a service that is visually attractive for the users to engage with.

For a small organization, it was great to have an online auction management service option that had a simple, relatively low cost pricing structure in order to eliminate the risk associated with subscription fees or high up-front costs.

The customer service was very responsive and quick, whether by email or by phone.

Item entry and management was simple and generally intuitive. It was great to have the ability to enter default choices as a batch and to update them as needed individually or as a group. Also, it was helpful to have the ability to upload 3 pictures per item.

There were some features that are less intuitive, so perhaps a more robust help section to eliminate the need to contact Customer Service. However, as mentioned above, they are very responsive, but it would be nice to find more answers without that step.

Although there is a nice printable instruction sheet for registering and bidding for users, I would find it helpful for future updates if there were more printable step-by-step instructions for volunteers (who may be less familiar with the software) to reference during bidding and check out.

I was disappointed that there is not an automated way within the software to create display bid description sheets automatically. However, customer service recommended that we use the export items feature and perform a mail merge in Word, and that worked beautifully for our purposes.

We have a small group and the features of bidding owl, as well as their staff support, make the program very user-friendly. I highly recommend their software for online auction events.

There is a learning curve to quickly enter items for a silent auction, but only because the software has many features with options to help cater the site to your group's needs.

Great customer support, especially for a "newbie" like me. The overall look is generally nice and clean. The bidding and check out process is fairly easy from the consumer end.
I like that we can save items from year to year. Once you've set it up once, the work has decreased immensely over the years.

I'd like to have a little more choice in font, colors, etc during the set up.
It would make sense to have the logo (and other info) for a donor come up when they are chosen as a donor for an item.
It would be helpful to keep bidders in the database when the auction is reset.

Ease of building our personal site. Overall look of auction was pleasing to our bidders. Ability to print reports and import bidders from our other software. could custom set bidding times for items. Can do mass email/text to all bidders. Customer service team were very response and super helpful. No upfront cost and reasonable rate of 4.9% for non-profits after auction closes.

Integrate live feed, we had a live event on Facebook in addition to our online auction. Bidders had to go between the site and live online event.

One of the best thing about online world is being able to reach many people, and working with this software just shows how sometimes you can limit yourself when you stick to traditional systems of handling business.

The software lets you track the entire auction process in real time. You can tell how you're performing and track progress to identify trends. Reports on auction activities can also be saved for future references in case you want to know which direction is best for your next online auction.

No one is good at everything and you have to learn and try new things. Great customer support makes it possible to wrap your head around the tool and be able to take off just in good time.

It's also cost-effective, which lets you focus more on revenue maximization. Since you can reach a wider audience, good planning and execution can get you tremendous results

It's very user-friendly. Adding items for auction on the tool is much simpler with templates. Also, you can add items prior to the big day so your bidders can get to know what's available.

There should be an option that lets you print bidding sheets.

Drag and drop feature isn't available. Would be a good thing to have.

User friendly, and the fact that you had a live-body to talk to if you had questions. User defaults made the process fast.

Accommodating a Raffle (admission tickets) was a little tricky, but doable. Fund-A-Need was hard to find for bidders. I think we could've raised more money on Fund-A-Need had those items been more prominently displayed or found. I wrote instructions, but I have a new mantra: "Nobody reads, and nobody listens!" I'm going to put it on a T-shirt. Would like a "Bidding Owl" button to put on our website vs. the link. Just a little more fun.

I would be hard-pressed to say what I like "most" about this software, but I think the fact that I didn't have to enter a data base was huge.

The only thing I can think of that was a teeny bit annoying was that I could not enter "one item with multiple bidders." If I had a single item that was open to 20 bidders, the item is displayed 20 times on the website. So, bidders must scroll past all of these to get to the next item.

I love that there is no subscription fee. The costumer support is great and I love that you can "reset" your auction if most items stay the same from year to year, rather than having to re-enter all items every year.

The close out process took me a little bit to figure out (although I am not super tech savvy).

Bidding Owl is incredibly user-friendly and offers a variety of options to customize the type of auction you are trying to build. I love how quickly we can add items, track bids and adjust features as needed.

We had a lot of donors, and the scrolling banner only offers a single-line scroll. 2 or 3 scroll lines to maximize the donor view would be a great addition.