BiddingOwl.com Reviews

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.

We liked that we could use it and test it out before buying. It is user friendly and we are able to quickly add new items to our auction. This is our second year using it and we really liked the option to carry over the listing from last year and edit, delete or add as needed. It saved a lot of time.

We wish the pictures on each listing could be larger or that the bidder could zoom in on them. I feel like all of our bidders can't see the amazing detail in our auction baskets. We also experienced a slight issue with bid increments and proxy bids. We set the bid increment on all of our auctions to $5, but the way proxy bids would outbid regular bids sometimes allowed a bid of $91 for example. It confused some of our bidders.

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 have been long standing customers with bidding owl! The system is user friendly, and it works like a charm! I am so pleased when I email or call in to the bidding owl office that someone is always able to help me get through any issue. This service matters most to our non-profit. In all our years using the system, no one has ever complained about access and usage.

It is difficult to think of cons...but if there was one thing I would change it would be to allow for larger photographs! Sometimes I just want to almost 'shout' about an item and its' value for the bidder!

Easy to learn, GREAT customer service when needed

Adding pictures was time-consuming. I used the scrolling banner to list sponsors. Banner management did not allow for auto alphabetizing.

I really like that we have an easy way for families to bid on items such as lunch with their teacher or front row seats to 6th grade graduation. I'm so thankful to have the option to sell tickets with no fee taken out or to offer items for bidding.

It would be nice if the 5% fee was reduced for non-profits, but I believe that's the lowest available, so we'll take it. I also would like the option to delete items from the bidding list rather than contacting customer support. I felt it was unclear that my payment information wasn't completely set up before my auction went live, but that was an easy fix.

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.

Low price for a small foundation. We ventured into the online auction as a way to continue fundraising during Covid-19. Start-up costs of any kind deplete our funds very quickly. Bidding Owl was very attractive for this reason, as well as catering to the non-profit industry specifically.

To be fair, auctions are new to us. At first the software did not seem intuitive, but after navigating the site multiple times, I found everything I needed and put the rest on the 'back burner' for future review.

We continue to use Bidding Owl every year for our online auction. It's very efficient and easy to use. I can also use information from past auctions to carry over items and other information from previous auctions, which saves a lot of time and effort.

Not a lot of cons, though I would like to see some new auction themes added.

It is pretty intuitive and not hard to navigate for first-time users.

There isn't a way to upload a spreadsheet for the auction items, so there's lots of key strokes necessary for each item. The Item Management portion is the most cumbersome of the entire site.

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.

My organization has been using BiddingOwl for more than 3 years, we loved it! It easy to use as the administrator and as the user.

I think it would be great if BiddingOwl can provide the "clicks statistic" in the future so we can identify how many clicks on some particular item without really bidding on it.

Hi Syifa, We wanted to let you know that you are able to view the number of views/clicks per item from your Item Export report, column Q. We hope this helps!

Bidding Owl is user friendly even for someone who is not techy. As we continue to use it we find even more features that have helped us with our Auction.

At first i was afraid to click on some of the menu buttons for fear of what might happen. I soon learned however that they have safeguards to prevent you from having to proceed in something you are not sure of.

I was able to roll out a professional auction platform in just 3 weeks. This was a result of the well-organized tutorials and BiddingOwl's absolutely outstanding and consistent customer support. Our bidders tell us how easy it is to search product, bid and pay. We are a small, for-profit company and we are able to configure the software parameters to adequately meet our needs. Our experience with BiddingOwl has given us the confidence to strongly pursue this new (for us) sales channel.

The tutorials could be much better. I found the answers to questions to be "bare bones" and I often had to query support to get the rest of the answers I was seeking. In addition, I would love to see bidding on all of our auction items (usually 6 per auction) on one page, real time; currently, we have to jump from page to page. And, for some reason, we must update our credit card before each auction (two per month) even though it does not change and the expiration date is far in the future. Scratching my head.

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.

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).

It is a great way to fundraise without spending money upfront.

You cannot look back at past auctions to see items.

Never used a site like this before but was able to set up our auction and add items with ease

Haven’t discovered any part of site I dislike

The ease of use in creating items, uploading pictures and seeing bidding statistics.

It would be nice to have an option to save the previous auction when starting a new one. I was able to export excel files with item and winner information though. It's also very simple to email customer support and they reset my auction to start a new one within 15 minutes!!

This online bidding software is very easy to use and set up. Photos are easy to load and it's easy for Bidders to register and customizable for notifications. Great value!

Not quite as many features as some other auction software companies, service went down twice during event, but we are using again. Great technical service, and all worked out well in the end.

Their customer service is really helpful and responsive. They really care and it shows. I'm located in Thailand and they made the changes in currency symbols to allow us to use Bidding Owl.

There is a bit of a learning curve involved in using Bidding Owl to it's fullest. It's easy once you spend that time.

it has a wider audience than just who we market to.

still is a bit archaic. You can't drop photos into it. It needs major updating.

We were able to set up this online auction very quickly which was necessary because of the virus precautions that forced us to reschedule our auction to the fall. We put together items that would expire by then. The set up was extremely easy and quite intuitive to use.

Using just photos in the scrolling banner is a great feature, but wasn't explained how to do that in any tutorial available. The technical support staff available both by phone and by e-mail were awesome however and were quickly able to resolve any questions I had, including this one.

The ease of use. It was my first time using bidding software for a charity event, and I was up and running in minutes.

I could get expensive, but so far we have managed to keep the fees reasonable for a non profit. Other than that, it was excellent.

This is our first time using the software for a non-profit auction. There's a ton of flexibility and the ability to do both the auction, manage donors and ticket sales in one place makes it the right fit for us.

Would love to see more customization on the auction page, including ability to remove footers