Auctria Software

Setting up the website for one!

Pros

The software does everything for you and makes it easy to run an auction and don't worry about learning how to use it, because the customer service reps answer any questions thoroughly.

Cons

I wish when you added pictures to preset slideshows and other website features that the system would automatically change the size as the example picture. I have to resize a lot of pictures for the slideshow.

Accurate accounting of the major fundraiser (other than our annual operating fund campaign) for our church. Also ability to maintain and manage accounts receivable (we don't take payment on the night of our auction). Help in recruiting volunteers for the auction - volunteer data entry is easier to come by when the data entry can be done remotely and is easy to learn. Our church is just a medium-sized one (350 members) and we cannot afford to spend thousands to have someone come in and run our yearly auctions. A yearly cost of less than what we pay is far less than the value we receive for this software. Our auctions have reached thousands od dollars in income the past two years. We are very excited about that. My ONLY concern is that should Auctria go out of business that we would lose all our data. THAT would be awful. I would hope and pray that we would be offered CSV files of all our data before it "disappeared."

Pros

Multi-user, retention of data by auction, emailing of invoices and donation receipts, and the ability to copy data from one auction to the next. Exceptional customer support and response. Our church uses this software so our auction's donors and bidders are mostly the same people. We auction items that have multiple winners (gourmet dinners, themed parties, etc. ). A few emails back and forth was all it took to get the software to handle this accurately. I searched quite a long while for a replacement for our ancient software (that was a multi-user nightmare) and I hit the jackpot when finding Charity Auction Organizer. I am a retired programmer/analyst and this software was easy to learn, has excellent Help, and the personalized support we needed. Taking awhile to get used to the newest version with Auctria, but we'll get there. Have used this product for four of our church's auctions and one other non-profit auction. We'll be using it again November 2018.

This was our first time to use any auction product -- in the past we have struggled with giant Excel spreadsheets. Auctria was affordable for us, and yet provided a robust product that allowed us to not only do better what we were already doing (track items, bidders, donors), but also do new things that we couldn't have managed before (automatically produce bid sheets, pre-register credit cards, batch check-out, invoice preparation, generate reports). And now we are familiar with those features, we are looking forward to using even more of Auctria's features next year. We are very pleased.

Pros

User interface. Customer support.

User-friendly, exceptionally responsive staff, and continuously improving. I've been a user for 3 years now and give it 5 stars.

I have used Auctria for several years. We are a very small non-profit and I have multiple duties in addition to development. I used a larger, better known, on-line auction company which was expensive. I looked at several sites and was very pleased with the ease of use of Auctria( it was Charity Auction Organizer Then). I loved the assistance provided at the beginning and to this date, my questions are answered almost immediately. Setting up pages is easy, easier than the more popular site I had used. The linkage through stripe has been great and easy to manage. I tell anyone who asks how pleased I am with the site and I cannot imagine why anyone would spend more money for less service. I highly recommend the site!

Pros

Ease of use. The reporting features are great. Tech assistance is quick and friendly. Love the sample pages.

Cons

Sometimes I have difficulty linking pages in a way that works for me and some design elements are difficult for me to add. With that being said, please know I am not that tech davy.

We are going on our third year using this software. It's really designed for online auctions so there are a few things that need adapting for in-house events. We have had some guests say they have had a difficult time registering for the event. Guest counts are tough but customer support is great on trying to find solutions. I'm very pleased with the auction website features.

We are able to easily pull the auction financial reports that we need.

RMSEL has used this software for the past 5 years. Every year our auction earns more money and the software improves! Great customer service with a helpful staff.

This is our first year using the Auctria Software for our online school auction. It was very easy to navigate through and exceeded our needs in features and support. We are looking forward to using this for years to come to enhance our fundraising online.

Pros

The ease of its features and the convenience for our parents.

Cons

Didn't have any issues

We have used Auctria for three years at our annual church auction (100-125 items, raising about $25,000 per year). The site is intuitive and very ease to use. Overall, an amazing product. Rob in tech support was also extremely helpful when we had questions.

Pros

Ease of use; features; import/export capabilities; reports.

Cons

Can't think of any.

My organization has been using Auctria (formerly Charity Auction Organizer) for three years now. While any software that has a multitude of features and capabilities can be somewhat difficult to learn, they have a highly responsive and knowledgeable customer support staff (with a special shout-out to Rob Walker) to help out through this learning and implementation process. We started slow using a limited amount of what is offered and have added more features every year. We also appear to have used a number of features in a manner that was not originally intended. In these instances, Auctria was receptive in making a few specific changes to accommodate us. I would highly recommend Autria for any fundraising activity, large or small. A first class organization.

Auctria is a amazing auction software. We used for our first online auction. Bidders loved the look and ease of use. As an administer , I found easy to learn. Customer support is excellent. All for a great price

I cannot believe the capabilities relative to the cost. Amazing! I run a silent auction for charity and this is the best organizational tool I've found. My items are numbered, grouped, bid sheets are created and a database keeps it all together.

Pros

No more creating bid sheets, checkout and payment issues. It is so helpful! This is also the first year we will have a catalog.

Cons

I haven't found any yet!

Advice to Others

Use it! You won't find more bang for your buck out there.

Volunteer Event Chair for the Market & Auction event for Variety in BC, Canada. We raise funds for special needs kids in BC, ranging from therapy to medication to wheelchairs and converted vans. We step in where Health Care ends to help families cope with the financial burdens of needed support for the child.

When I took over as Chair of this event 4 years ago the auction item bid sheets were...and I kid you not....handled in a single Word document. 200 pages long. 1 item per page. And that was just for starters! Each item was in a separate Word doc, from display sheets to receipts to certificates.

I had made a switch to a set of Excel documents with formulas and master sheets which was substantially better, but still time consuming. Much more accurate, but time consuming.

Then by some miracle I found CAO while looking for something else. The more I explored what it could do the more excited I got, and by the time I met with my partner to tell her about it I was almost bouncing off the walls in joy! The following meeting with my committee I went over the basics of the program, and every time someone brought up a concern or question I was able to answer it with "Oh don't worry, CAO does that.....right here...let me show you..."

Pros

Add to that the fact that your support team responds quickly and with wonderful detail, and that you have priced it so charities can actually afford it? You better believe I will continue telling EVERYONE about how amazing your service is! Hundreds of hours have likely been saved over the past 2 years of using it, and peace of mind for the processing team is priceless.

Cons

Now my biggest problem is remembering you are now Auctria instead of CAO

Advice to Others

Auctria really does do it all, does it well!

Auction co-chair. We started using Auctria this past year and instantly made our auction activies more organized!

Pros

Man...hard to pick a favorite feature.

I thought the whole tool was very easy to use and quite helpful. I like the reporting. So easy to produce receipts, payment reports, etc, etc. Also appreciated the ease of uploading bidder & donor lists. Loved that the support team was so easily/quickly accessible.

Cons

You should advertise more, we have been running an auction for 7 years and we just found Auctria.

Advice to Others

The site as a whole was very easy to navigate.

I co-chair the auction to fundraise for our school.

In the past we used to do our auction almost manually, our registration and check out last year was frustrating and complicated. With Auctria this year's was soooooooooooo much smoother.

Pros

I also love how you can see the details of everything - item, donor, starting bid, purchased price, winner, etc. I LOVED the reporting capabilities, and the fact that items were easy to enter, to change/amend, to track, and everything happened at a push of a button.

Cons

We were still getting used to the program and didn't use all the features, we ran out of time. We did not actually use the website portion this year but hope to do so next time.

Advice to Others

We did research a couple of options before going with Auctria. It seemed to us that Auctria had everything that we needed (and more!), and for a much better price than some of the competitors.

We just finished out first Auction and went in unsure of what to expect. After reading such great reviews online for Auctria.com and seeing the price was affordable we tried it out. Auctria has saved SO MUCH time in many areas: streamlining the check out process, coordinating the after-event reports ... very easy to use this software, very user-friendly! The only drawback, if I 'had' to put one down is that you cannot call them for immediate support; however, Rob was fairly quick in responding to each and every question we had - very appreciative! I've been to several very large Auctions that use software costing thousands of dollars; Auctria did everything we needed and more for a few hundred dollars. I would highly recommend this product!

We hosted our first online auction and this website was so easy to use, a great value, and we received good customer service from Rob. He was always there to answer any questions we had. The website was very efficient and our auction is doing great! We will be using this website for all of our future auctions.

After using another auction package for 5 years, we switched to Auctria for our 2016 auction. We were very impressed - the software is easy to learn, easy to use, the use of icons is intuitive. We had over 850 items on our auction and over 500 active bidders, with no problems at all. I highly recommend this software package.

Our education foundation used this site for a small online auction with 24 items. We also added some items to purchase, and asked for online donations. The auction worked extremely well, and the site was easy to navigate. we had a complication with the purchases and donations because we're not on stripe.com; we had to re-direct purchasers and donors to our own website to pay.

We used Charity Auction Organizer to conduct our school's online fundraising auction in Februrary 2016. The software is easy to use with intuitive interface, has all the main functions necessary to conduct the auction. Credit card integration with stripe.com is seamless and allows to process sales immediately. We especially liked the ability to grab images from urls and resize/edit them right within the softwate. Charity Auction Organizer is very cost effective, which is crucial for a non-profit organization when every raised penny counts.
Rob provided superior customer service and support, answering all the questions professionally, providing the exact information we needed and in a very timely manner.
There are certain improvements that would make the platform even better, specifically better options for auction site design, ability to display items with the most activity, some kind of dashboard on the main page showing categories, items without bids, hot items etc. and most importantly extended bidding feature.
Overall, I highly recommend this product for online auctions.