BiddingOwl.com Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

I find it really user friendly for the most part. I like the ability to include items that are in our silent and live auctions without being charged a % fee for them. Bidding Owl has really reasonable rates and amazing customer service. I love that we have our own auction site name that is easy for people to remember and to use in marketing materials. I would love to try mobile bidding, which I think is a great feature, but the location we've used for many years for our auction event has really poor internet.

There are certain features I wish would be implemented, such as the ability to rearrange images and the ability for bidders to right click on items to open them in new tabs. Other auction sites have this feature, and I wish BiddingOwl had it as well. I also really wish we could store people's credit card information to make checkout more streamlined at the end of the live/silent auction event. I wish there was more flexibility in editing our home page design.

I've used BiddingOwl.com for two annual online auctions for my children's school, and am setting up our third auction now. I love how easy it is to use, and that I can also re-use last year's setup by requesting that the old bids be deleted. This saves a ton of time because a lot of our auction items are repeated. I also like the layout and appearance of the webpage for users. It is very simple for bidders to create their account and start bidding. The notifications sent to bidders when they are outbid is also helpful for promoting continued engagement with the online auction.

I do rather wish there was a way to sort my items a little more easily. They display according to item number, and I like to group all of the items from each grade together. I wind up shuffling the item numbers around quite a bit to get everything in the proper order. Also, it would be nice to be able to rename the portion of the URL after the slash...I didn't think about that when I used the whole name of our school, which is quite tedious to type and promote after "www.BiddingOwl.com/".

A lot of tools to use for fundraising I like that you can preset auction preferences so you do not need to enter the same info for all items Customer Support was very quick with all inquiries!

Item management was tedious. The full list of items was difficult to sort in any way. Once sorted, as soon as you update another item, it defaults back to how it was originally sorted. I had to keep resorting my item list to find the items I needed to update. I would have like the ability to print bid sheets for online auction, as ours started as an online auction and finishes at an event, as an online auction. Providing QR codes to each item is a miss. We had to manually do this for our event, where other services provide it. If web addresses and logos are provided in donor section, that should pull through to item section when you tie it to a donor. Instead, we had to re-enter all logos and websites on items.

We tried an online auction for the first time, due to COVID closing down the school where we usually had our physical auction. This product was very user-friendly and intuitive. The tutorials were helpful as well. The item presentations looked very professional, with pictures and as much space as you needed for descriptions. I could even cut and paste pictures and descriptions from websites for items that could be found online. People said they found it easy to sign up. We ran the auction for a week and people enjoyed being able to bid from home. There are also options for "text me if I'm outbid" and putting in a maximum bid that you will automatically go up to. People found it fun to get those alerts! We had people participate who normally wouldn't have attended an auction in person.

The biggest issue was the inability to add a donation at checkout. BO says they are planning to add this feature in an upgrade next month. The other issue was multiple "you won an item" notifications at the end, and it wasn't very intuitive to see how to get to the payment page. I believe this is also going to be streamlined in the upcoming BO software update. Almost all of our people paid right away so we didn't have to chase down anybody for payment. We set up two options for pickup at a specified location - a weeknight and a Saturday.

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.