Handbid App of your iPad

Its been a while since we last posted a blog.  I am sure many of you have wondered what we have been up to.  Well, we have been hyper-focused on making our software the best it can be and to make Handbid more accessible to a larger number of charities and non-profits.

iPad app for your silent and live auction

Meet our new iPad app, our completely redesigned app!

Over the winter, we have significantly improved our auction manager platform and re-wrote our iPad kiosk software from the ground up using the latest Apple iOS SDK.  Our new Handib app for iPad is truly remarkable and has proven to be very popular at the auctions where it was recently used.  

In addition to being faster and more user-friendly, the app has the following additional enhancements:

• Better filtering capability to filter a bid-pad to only specific categories or tables
• A complete tutorial that auction managers can use to learn how to setup and use. 
• A real-time auction timer that shows the time remaining in an auction
• Real-time connections to the servers.  No more refreshing the app.  Once a bid is updated, the app knows about it immediately and updates things on the screen immediately.  See it in action here.

You can learn more about the Handbid iPad app at www.handbid.com or feel free to contact us with any questions.

New Mobile Apps available in the App Store!
While we have working Android and iPhone apps that have successfully allowed bidders to bid from virtually anywhere, we knew we could make them better. Both of them underwent a complete redesign! No more frameworks. Everything is built using native SDKs from Apple and Google. Look for a blog post soon from Taylor Romero on why we believe in native apps over a mobile web experience for bidders. Some of the new features they include are:

• Complete re-write using the latest software from Google and Apple
• Real time connections to the server.  No more having to refresh the mobile app to get updated bid values and other auction information
• Faster and easier to use
• Facebook connect (iPhone only right now)

A new pricing model that is more accessible to smaller non-profits and auctions
We have spent a lot of time reviewing our pricing and making sure that we make Handbid as cost effective as possible.  We have been testing this pricing with non-profits in our private-beta program and intend to roll this out publicly in May.  The pricing will be based on a fixed-fee (annual or monthly billing) and a performance fee based on a percentage of auction revenue raised.  We have a lot of thoughts on this approach and we will be sharing these in an upcoming blog post along with the pricing details.  

In the meantime, please feel free to contact us with more questions on pricing.

Exciting new features with Handbid - Integrated Payments
You asked and we obliged. Coming in the next several weeks are some exciting new features in Handbid. We won't discuss all of them just yet, but one that we are sure will be popular is integrated credit-card payments. We did a trial of this at a few auctions already and it was a hit with the customers and bidders (who loved the convenience). We have always supported payments and receipts, but we had not supported an integrated CC payment system until now. What will integrated payments do for your auction? Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Capture CC from a bidder at registration or checkin
• Speedup checkout by billing the bidder with their card on file
• Set a CC threshold on your auction (e.g. allow bidders to bid up to a certain total amount before requiring them to enter a card)
• Allow bidders to checkout (this will come a bit later on)

Stick with us - its going to get really exciting - really fast…
We are just getting started and are glad you are along for the ride.  Please remain subscribed to this Blog and encourage your colleagues to do the same.  You can forward this post to a friend here!  The benefits of staying connected with us are:

• Get product announcements and new information regarding Handbid
• Learn best practices from auction veterans and experts
• Look for special promotions and discounts when they become available