Bidding Owl made our online auction run smoothly. It was easy to set-up and manage plus our bidders had a positive experience as well. Would definitely use Bidding Owl again.

Easy step by step process to set-up an auction. Allowed for multiple pictures of the items. Easy to use and manage the auction. Easy to close out the items and locate shipping information for winning bidders. Connects with PayPal for easy and quick payment.

We had one bidder who backed out of the purchase and I couldn't locate a place on the bidding site to cancel his bid and select the next highest bidder. I had to call customer support and they handled it quickly.

Very positive! BiddingOwl.com is a solid auction platform with a dedicated support team behind it.

Loved the ability to test it out, then convert it into my live online auction event. Easy setup with knowledgeable, responsive support when questions arose. Bidders can view items larger to see details and receive an email or text message if outbid.

I look forward to the new release coming soon. Hoping for more customization of fonts, colors and backgrounds. Also the ability to change the title of “Fund-a-Need and More” non-biddable items, easily reorder them, and see an improved user-friendly interface for checkout.

We've been able to (more easily) raise a lot more money through out online / fundraising auctions when using this software. We've also had comments from our supporters that it has made things easier on their end.

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.

We are very pleased with BiddingOwl.com because it permits us to hold an auction without organizing a live event. We've often debated whether or not our population of parents would be likely to attend a live function and how successful that would be, so the online-only auction is a great solution for us.

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/".

Although our organization supports work that involves over 250,000 kids in Africa, we have no paid employees (not an option to select at the beginning of this survey). So we wanted something that would be easy for multiple people to use. The reason we went with BO was because they actually had a phone number and somebody to talk to. They have EXCELLENT customer service, always getting back quickly, even providing an emergency after-hours number.

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.

I've been really pleased with the overall experience with Bidding Owl. I think its best feature is the customer service. They have helped me repeatedly, even when the problem is on my computer's end and not a site issue. I highly recommend Bidding Owl for a small to medium fundraising effort. Ours is a school parent club raising approximately $35k-$50k per year.

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.

As a school group and non-profit we really needed a low cost auction solution. Not only was this low cost, but we increased our auction revenue so much over the standard paper and pen silent auction. Our parents and bidders loved it and loved being able to bid on their phones during the event. Just remember not to plan anything big at your event during the last 10 minutes of auction bidding, because everyone will be glued to their phones and having fun bidding. Proxy bid functionality is awesome, but lots of bidders still like to be in the moment and do it manually.

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.

I have set up an auction with over 70 items single handedly, with a minimum of pain.

I like how Bidding Owl lets you set up an attractive auction website, with very straightforward and foolproof functionality. I also like how it is all inclusive, rather than nickle and diming you for each bit of functionality. Also, when I reached out to customer support with a concern by email, they got back to me immediately.

I would love to be able to list an auction item under two categories. I feel like by having to choose a category for each item, you run the risk that you will mis-categorize and lose a potential bidder. I also wish there was real time, live person, chat support.

I used this software for our elementary school online auction. It was great to use for bidders, visually really bright and pretty! The cost was wonderful too for what you receive! Im a huge fan!

I loved the ease of use for this product. Set up was extremely easy, support was quick very responsive and helpful! The product has reports you can run and emails you can send to bidders and winners. Easy to download to excel as well. I also loved that it works on your mobile as well for easy access. Great for the price.

Only con would be if it would ask users for their childs name as well so it would appear on the invoices since im using this for school.

Overall a great experience, we've used it multiple times and plan to again in the future!

BiddingOwl worked very well for our non-profit's annual auctions. It's easy to learn how to use and it was intuitive for our bidders too. It offers flexibility and customization, and the support system was fairly helpful. It's much less expensive than the other vendors we looked at and we are overall happy with how our events went.

I've had a few unhelpful replies from customer support. It can be tedious to edit all of your items, for example if you want to renumber them. A few bidders had trouble figuring out how to checkout. Uploading images sometimes produced errors.

After 10 years of doing the traditional live and silent auction, we decided to give the online auction option a try. After quite a bit of research, we chose BiddingOwl as our online software. We now make more than half of our total profit from the online part of our auction, and I am pushing to completely move to online only. BiddingOwl has made this shift incredibly easy and profitable. We are now able to reach a much wider audience. This is our fourth year using BiddingOwl and we will continue to do so!

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.

The thing that I love about BiddingOwl is they have a very supportive team, as an NGO sometimes it is hard for us to pay the fee, but they're patiently waiting for us!

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.

It was a great experience and i found the support to be very helpful. I sometimes felt bad having to call them about something I probably should know, but they were patient and helpful.

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.

Really top-notch. I feel like they care about our business and want us to succeed.

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.

It was great. We initially thought the SMS alerts were not working but in fact they were and worked fantastic! Having a different pricing structure for NFP (Not For Profit) organisations would definitely get more customers their way.

We liked how easy it was to enter the the Bidding Item, the Donor and the bidding specifics, such as Market Value, Start and Bidding increments. We also like the ease of updating these details. The Multiple edit options to change from Silent to Online auction was really great as it saved as individually going thorough each item and manually changing it!

Not many, except we are based in Australia, and even thought the Bidding End Date and time was shown, the countdown clock was showing what I'm guessing was Michigan Time zone. Although this could have been our fault for not configuring it properly. I'm sure there is an easy fix for it, otherwise we couldn't find any faults with it.

Since i am typing this review before the auction ends, my overall experience is good. This is the first time our school moves from traditional paper silent auction to online bidding. We'll see how much this is better than the traditional way.

With the simple and easy-to-enter templates, i got a bunch of items online in no time. Customer support replied to email within a day. With the software, we can now let parents to see what items are on auction before the day of event.

it would be nice if they support more than 1 count of an item in an auction. i don't want to have 12 identical items on a page because we have received 12 of them. it would be better if we can limit the site to invitation only.

The overall experience has been awesome. BiddingOwl was completely intuitive.

What I like best about BiddingOwl is that our annual Christmas Fair was not going to be a total bust this because of COVID-19 and now, just 2 days after going LIVE with our online auction, we've already raised over $4200, and we have 25 days before the auction closes! Our Christmas Fair may just end up being the best we've ever had!!

That it's not easy to rearrange Sponsors into a different order after they've been input. I wish there was a 'drag to rearrange' option.

Great way to make the auction process easy for the bidder and the host!

We have used Bidding Owl for 3 years as an ancillary fundraiser to our Banquet, and found it especially helpful, both used as a stand-alone online auction, and also used in conjunction (once things opened up after COVID) with an in-person, but bidding online auction. It worked just great to get things done, but also lets people start bidding in advance of the event.

Only allows use of PayPal as a payment source for users.

[SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] have been so helpful with the many questions I had before and during the auction. This was a last-minute decision to do an online auction when our event was canceled back in April. We were so glad to raise some money for our school.

The software was user-friendly; very basic.

I wish there was a Venmo option for payments in addition to PayPal.

While at first we were unsure that an auction site was for us the ease of setting up our auction and the apparent ease of bidders to set them selves up we are on track to meet our goals for the auction. The support staff are FANTASTIC. Product is a definite 10

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 Bidding Owl allowed our community to raise funds in a fun way online when an in-person event was not possible. We also found that by using this site, we raised more funds than we had at any time in the past.

This is still a great platform for fundraising events and reaches people beyond my hometown. Once the online auction starts, the event runs itself complete with checkout procedures.

Some older individuals find navigating to be confusing when registering and then when checking out. Knowing that you need to click on the green shopping cart with the check-mark to summarize your items and create an invoice is helpful.

Wonderful!

Easy to Use, wonderful customer service, Very professional look to the site.

Nothing bad to say. We had a great experience.

My overall experience is a positive one. I have found the site to be very easy to navigate even via mobile. I think that the customer support is very helpful and quick to respond so if I ever do have an issue it can be solved or answered in a day's time.

I really enjoy that the fees are low and the interface in setting up the auction is relatively easy to navigate.

I have had trouble in both years with the highest bidder not making payment straight away. My auction is for charity so the more items I sell the better for kids with cancer. I think it would be awesome to have an automatic payment for highest bidders available to lock them into bidding.

Being able to raise money by using bidding owl helps the school so much with enrichment programs.

The ability to create edit and use for a elementary auction is welcomed. We have had many successes due to biddy now being easy to use for everyone.

Payment. I wish there was a way to keep credit cards on file to ease check out.