Choosing charity auction software: a UK buyer’s checklist.

Every supplier’s feature list looks similar, because at this point most of them do most of it. What separates them sits underneath: where the money goes, who owns the data, and what happens at 8:40pm when four hundred people try to bid at once.

Take this to every supplier you are considering, us included, and write the answers down. The comparison makes itself.

On the money (ask these first)

1. Whose merchant account do our guests’ payments land in — yours or ours?
2. What does your platform add on top of the payment processor’s own fee?
3. Do you take any percentage of what we raise, at any level or above any threshold?
4. Is there a per-guest, per-bidder or per-transaction charge?
5. Do you add a tip, donation or “support the platform” prompt to our guests’ checkout? Can it be switched off, and is it off by default?
6. On a £60,000 evening with 200 guests, what does the charity actually bank? Give me the number.
7. What happens to money already collected if we cancel mid-contract?

On Gift Aid and UK compliance

8. Do you capture Gift Aid declarations at the point of giving?
9. Do you handle the split between the declared retail value of a lot and the donated excess, automatically?
10. Can we run regular giving by standing order as well as by card, with Gift Aid on both?
11. Is the data held in the UK or EU, and what is your position under UK GDPR?

On the night itself

12. What happens to a bid placed at the exact moment the guest’s signal drops?
13. Can the platform run if the venue’s internet fails completely?
14. Can a guest bid without creating an account, if we want them to?
15. How are guests told they have been outbid, and how fast?
16. Can we take payment automatically on the night from a card held on file, rather than chasing afterwards?
17. Does check-in work per guest, or per order? (A table of ten is ten arrivals, not one.)

On what happens afterwards

18. Can we export every supporter, bid and donation into our CRM, in a usable format, whenever we want?
19. What do we keep access to if we do not renew?
20. Who answers the phone at 7pm on a Saturday, and is that a person who has run an event?

Three answers worth being wary of

“It’s free.” Not a scandal, but it means the revenue arrives another way, usually a share of your guests’ money. Convert it into pounds before comparing.

“We handle the payments for you.” Sometimes genuinely convenient. Always worth following with: and what do you take on the way past?

“Everyone uses us.” Possibly true, and irrelevant to what your charity banks on the night.

Our own answers, for the record

Since we are asking you to put these to suppliers, here are ours in the same order.

Money: your merchant account, via your own Stripe keys. We add nothing on top of Stripe’s standard rate. No percentage of what you raise, at any level. No per-guest or per-bidder fee. No tipping prompt. On a £60,000 evening you bank £60,000 less Stripe’s own processing. Our fee is nothing at all when you book Kevin as your auctioneer or host, or £995 a year on its own.

Gift Aid: declarations captured at the point of giving, the retail-value split handled automatically, regular giving by card and standing order with Gift Aid on both.

The night: offline-resilient bidding, an on-site event server that runs without venue internet, optional account-free bidding, outbid alerts by email, SMS and WhatsApp, card-on-file with automatic charging, and per-guest QR check-in.

Afterwards: full export to your CRM whenever you want. And the person who answers on a Saturday evening is a working charity auctioneer who built the platform.

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