Processing payments quickly

July 23, 2009 6:58 AM

What are point-of-sale solutions for a charity auction?

I'm helping a local charity collect payments for this year's fundraiser. They do a silent auction, and after it closes everyone rushes up to the front to pay and collect their item. There usually are about 150 transactions to clear.

In the past they have used multiple laptops with cellular modem cards (the venue has no Wifi) to collect credit card payments via Paypal. Can anyone recommend a better solution? I was thinking iPhones with point-of-sale apps might work, but have no experience with these apps or their respective backends.

posted by RobotVoodooPower to work & money (4 comments total)

I've been helping on a local charity silent auction for the last 3-4 years. Ours has about fifty lots, and this year raised in the ballpark of £5700 (a shade over $9000). Final selling prices range from about £20 up to £1200. I don't know how this compares to your SA, but I'm giving you the numbers to give you a context, because:

We don't take credit cards. We insist on cash, or cheque with a banker's card. It makes everything a lot faster, means we're not losing a percentage to card-services, and it turns out that nobody minds. It does help that there's an ATM a few hundred yards down the street.
posted by Hogshead at 9:38 AM on July 23, 2009

Must you complete the transactions on the spot? My organization runs a silent auction, and I believe they just collect the credit card/billing info and process back in the office. You could create a little form that they have to fill out before picking up their items. Low-tech, but it works.

That said, it's our organization's members that are bidding, so we can trust them and get in touch if the charge doesn't go through. You may not have the same circumstances.
posted by misskaz at 10:01 AM on July 23, 2009

My daughter's school has used Tofino Auctions to run their yearly auction. I was not involved in the auction organization, but as an attendee, it was very smooth (pre-swiping credit cards!)
posted by vespabelle at 2:26 PM on July 23, 2009

We used AuctionPay at our Gala this year. We had 1200 attendees, about 600 registered for the silent auction to get a bidder number. There were 109 items and 76 winners. We too struggle with 100 people lined up the minute the silent auction closes expecting to check out immediately when we still have about 20-30 minutes in processing work to get ready for them. That rushed feeling has led to errors the last few years and I'm about fed up with it.

We went to auctionpay because of its ability to pre-swipe cards and hopefully cut down on that. But we had a hardware failure that negated all that benefit. This failure only happened because we were using two master terminals, if you're only going to use one, then you'd probably be safe.

The other reason we're not going back to auctionpay is because it just isn't customizable enough to work with how our guest expect to be serviced. You pretty much have to use AuctionPay as they designed it or keep a bunch of stuff in separate spreadsheets, which defeats the purpose of a central DB.

This year we're probably going to go with a custom solution using card swiping technology you can buy (just like swiping a student card in the lunch line) relatively cheaply and a piece of software provided by our merchant account provider. I'm meeting with my tech guys soon to go over the details of that.
posted by IndigoSkye at 8:43 PM on July 25, 2009