FAQ: "Limited" Mobile Bidding
From time to time, I’m going to post questions sent to me from auction chairs about our product or company, along with our answers.
Last summer, we changed our annual plans and added “limited” mobile-bidding features to the Standard annual plan. We also added a bunch of new mobile-bidding features to our Plus and Premium annual plans. This has lead to people (like Laura, whose question is featured below) to ask what the differences are between the “full-featured” mobile-bidding that Plus and Premium subscribers get, and the “limited” mobile-bidding features that Standard subscribers get.
Laura asks:
Hi Roger,
We spoke a few months ago and are finally getting to the decision time for selecting our software. I have a few questions:
- if we went with the standard plan for $1000/month. What does it mean to have “limited” mobile bidding? Is there a cap on the items that we can use for mobile bidding?
- Can you explain the notifications that come with this level? What exactly does email and in-brower notifications mean?
Thanks for your help.
My answer:
Hi Laura,
Excellent questions. Here are some answers:
- There are no hard limits on the number of mobile items you can have in the Standard plan. But it is limited to Silent Auction and Signup items only - you cannot do a mobile Special Appeal/Paddle Raise/Fund-A-Need or Live Auction.
- Related to that, in the Standard package, mobile bidders are alerted if they are outbid in two ways - they see a small indicator in the top right corner of their mobile device’s browser, and they get an email message letting them know that they have been outbid.
Many of the groups that used our software for mobile-bidding auctions last year asked us for some improvements that would make it easier to run auctions with more than say, a dozen or so mobile-bidding items. These include:
- outbid notifications via text-message
- invitations to bid via text-message
- the ability to use mobile bidding for other item types
- the ability to run talent contests and group-bidding (think Dessert Dash) via the mobile-bidding system
So we added those new features, to our Plus annual plan. At the same time, we added the existing mobile-bidding features (which had been Plus-only) to our Standard annual plan, to give more groups the option to test the mobile-bidding waters out and see if it would work for their group.
