BiddingOwl: how its 5% fee works for a UK charity

In short

• BiddingOwl is a charity auction platform run from Gaylord, Michigan, covering silent, live, online and mobile bidding, ticketing, paddle raises, Fund-a-Need and paper bid sheets in one account.
• Its only platform charge is a 5% performance fee, and only on items that take a winning online or mobile bid. Tickets, donations, bid sheets and checkout cost nothing. That is off its own pricing page in October 2026.
• On pre-bid auctions, the 5% is worked out on the pre-bid amount rather than the final bid.
• Card processing stays yours: you connect your own Stripe or PayPal account.
• Nothing in it claims Gift Aid, and its raffle feature is written for American state law, not the Gambling Act.

What is BiddingOwl, and who runs it?

It is a fundraising auction platform owned by BiddingOwl.com LLC, a small American company based at a PO Box in Gaylord, Michigan. The phone number on every page is a Michigan landline. Its terms were last revised in February 2015, which is a long time for a product to stay the shape it is.

The product is broad for the money. Its features page lists proxy bidding, watchlists, outbid texts, raffle and admission tickets, paddle raises, Fund-a-Need, bulk CSV import and paper bid sheets for the people who still want them. Its about page leans on one promise: you will reach a human on the phone. In this market, that is not nothing.

How does the BiddingOwl 5% performance fee work?

It applies only to items that actually receive a winning online or mobile bid. The pricing page is unusually specific: “The 5% performance fee applies only when an item receives a winning online/mobile bid.” A lot that sells for $100 online costs you $5. A lot that draws no online bid costs you nothing.

One detail is worth reading twice. On pre-bid auctions the fee is calculated on the pre-bid amount, not the final hammer price. If you open bidding online and then sell the same lots live from the stage, where the fee lands depends on how the auction is set up, so ask before you build it.

Here is the arithmetic on a mid-sized UK auction, using BiddingOwl’s own rate and Stripe’s published UK cards rate of 1.5% plus 20p.

Is BiddingOwl free for a silent auction?

It is, as long as the bidding happens on paper. The pricing page spells out the free half: organise the event, preview items on your BiddingOwl site, print bid sheets, sell tickets, collect donations, run checkout and invoicing. “This is a free service, and we do not charge you.”

So a silent auction with clipboards on the tables costs nothing beyond card processing. The moment guests bid from their phones, which is why most charities buy a platform at all, the 5% switches on. That is an honest deal. It is still a percentage, and percentages scale with your best night rather than with the work done.

Should a UK charity pass BiddingOwl’s fee to supporters?

Carefully, and only with the disclosure the UK code requires. BiddingOwl offers what it calls a supporter contribution, or a buyer’s premium, added on top of a winning bid or donation so the charity keeps 100% of the raised total. Its pricing page says this “essentially makes the use of our software free for online nonprofit auctions”.

The Fundraising Regulator’s guidance on online platforms sets the bar in the UK. Before you ask for a supporter’s card details, they must be able to see how the fee is calculated, how much you will receive from their payment, and how the fee can be amended or removed. If it can be removed, there has to be a straightforward way to do it.

None of that makes a buyer’s premium wrong. It does mean the wording on your checkout screen is your responsibility, not your supplier’s.

Whose Stripe account does the money land in?

Yours. This is the part BiddingOwl gets right where several bigger rivals do not. Its payment integrations page is plain that you connect your own Stripe or PayPal account, that rates are set by the processor, and that “BiddingOwl does not set the organization’s card-processing rate”. You can also take cash or cheque outside the system and mark invoices paid.

No supplier float, no weekly payout run, no hold on your own money. I think the case for a charity holding its own Stripe keys is worth an hour of anyone’s time.

Will BiddingOwl claim your Gift Aid or register your raffle?

No to both, and it has never claimed otherwise. There is no Gift Aid declaration anywhere in the product, which matters more than it sounds. HMRC’s detailed guidance is clear that “Payments to a charity in return for services, rights or goods are not gifts to charity”, so most of an auction never qualified anyway. The gifts around it do, and those are worth 25p on every pound. If that split is new to you, start with Gift Aid before you choose any platform.

The raffle feature carries a sharper edge. BiddingOwl’s own features page tells you to “check your state laws regulating the sale of raffle tickets”, which is sound advice in Michigan and useless in Leicester. In Britain, a raffle run at your event is an incidental lottery, and the Gambling Commission is blunt about the limit: “You can’t sell tickets online (which includes social media) or in advance of the event.” Sell tickets online and you are running a small society lottery instead, which has to be registered with your local licensing authority. There is more on those rules on the electronic raffle page.

What BiddingOwl gets right

It publishes its price in plain English, charges for one thing instead of five, and answers the phone. Office hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm Eastern Time, which lands between 2pm and 10pm in the UK, so a British organiser ringing at teatime will usually get a person. There is a 24/7 emergency line on top.

If the whole fundraiser is the auction, BiddingOwl deserves to be on your list.

What Generosity Works does instead of a percentage

It takes no percentage, ever. The charity’s own Stripe keys, prices in pounds, Gift Aid captured at the moment of the gift, and an offline event server for when the venue wifi folds at 8pm. No tipping prompt, nothing added to Stripe’s rate.

It is also not a product you buy. It is free when a charity books me as auctioneer and host, and my fee is the only money Generosity Works takes. The platform is not sold on its own; our pricing page explains why. That fee is one fee agreed up front and does not move with the total. The auctioneer and host side of my work sits on its own site.

The reason I am strict about percentages is one room I worked twice. The year before I came in, an outside company ran that charity’s silent auction from a catalogue of bought-in lots. It grossed around £13,000 and the charity saw about £1,300. The following year the same guests, in the same room, gave £8,300 through a live pledge that cost nothing in commission. Nobody did anything wrong. The arithmetic just went somewhere else.

And no platform, BiddingOwl included, changes the thing that decides your total. Every lot has one winner. Ten lots in a room of two hundred means ten winners, and a hundred and ninety guests who arrived willing and went home having given nothing, because there was nothing left to win. A tiered pledge straight after the auction fixes that. The generosity is already in the room, and software has never been the thing that releases it.

If BiddingOwl is still the right fit after all that, go in with two answers in hand: which items the 5% will actually land on, and who is claiming the Gift Aid on the gifts around the bidding. Both are easier to settle in March than on the night.

If you have a number to hit this year, and nobody has yet explained why last year raised what it raised, let’s talk about your number.