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If you are running an online auction, yes, and cost is usually what decides it. Zeffy takes nothing, so a £400 winning bid is £400 for your cause. More than 8,000 organisations have run an auction on Zeffy.
You get item pages with photos, and bidding from any phone with no app to download and no account to create. Auto-bidding lets a supporter set their maximum and leave it to run. Outbid alerts go out by email and text, and anti-sniping stops a last-second bid quietly taking a lot. It is built for charities rather than adapted for them, which is why your auction sits in the same account as your donations, events and supporter records.
Where it is not the right tool: a gala built around an auctioneer calling live bids.
Create your auction page, add each item with a photo, a starting bid and a minimum bid increment, then set your open and close dates. Bidding starts and stops exactly when you want. You can also set a pick-up location so winners know where to collect. Zeffy tracks every bid from there, so you can watch it happen rather than manage it. For the run-up, our guide to hosting a silent auction walks through it in nine steps. That covers securing lots, promoting the evening, and the licence you need if you are serving alcohol.
Online auctions, usually called silent auctions: you list your lots, supporters bid from their phones until your close time, and the highest bid on each lot wins. That works whether they are bidding from home or sitting in the room at your event.
For your bidders it is deliberately light. There is no app and no account to create, just their contact and payment details on the first bid. Their card is saved after that, so bidding again takes a couple of taps. Anyone who would rather not watch their phone can set a maximum and let auto-bidding hold their place, with Zeffy placing the increment for them until someone goes past it. Each item shows who is winning right now and the bids that came before, so it feels like a contest rather than a form. When your auction closes, winning bids are charged automatically.
If your gala centres on an auctioneer calling live bids, that needs a different setup, and there is an answer further down on collecting that money through Zeffy.
Put your auction's QR code on the tables or up on a screen, and guests scan and bid from their own phones, with nothing to download and no account to create. Anyone who is outbid hears about it straight away, by email and by text, which is what keeps the bidding moving during dinner. Everyone also gets a text when the auction is about to close, which matters in a room where nobody is watching their inbox. Guests who would rather not watch their phone all evening can set a maximum instead and let auto-bidding hold their place, and they are only alerted if someone goes past it. And if a bid lands in the final seconds, anti-sniping pushes that lot's close time out by three minutes. The person they outbid gets a fair chance to respond, up to half an hour of extensions.
It also takes cash out of the equation, which matters at a village hall evening or a fete where far fewer guests carry any.
Automatically. When your close time passes, Zeffy charges the winning bid to the card that bidder already entered, and emails them a receipt. You are not chasing anyone the week after the event.
Yes. Turn on offline and cash bids, and supporters can take part without entering payment details. Those winners are not charged automatically, so you collect their payment yourself, in cash, by cheque or by bank transfer, and record it against them.
No. Gift Aid cannot be claimed on ticket or item purchases, so it is not available on auction forms or event forms at all. A winning bid is payment for the lot, whatever the lot turns out to be worth.
If you want Gift Aid on the night, run a separate donation ask alongside the auction. Gift Aid is offered on donation forms, and on Zeffy it runs through a connected Swiftaid account, so the declaration is confirmed at the point someone gives. Two limits to plan around: on a form that carries both, Gift Aid applies to the donation only and never to what the guest bought, and it is not available on payments taken through the Tap to Pay app.
If a lot gets no bids by the time your auction closes, no payment is collected and it simply goes unsold. You will know exactly which ones. Export your auction as an itemised payments report and every bid shows against the item it was placed on. You can see what drew interest, and what to price differently or leave out next time.
Zeffy runs online auctions with no platform fee, no per-item fee and no fee on winning bids. GalaBid is one of the platforms UK charities weigh up for mobile bidding, and its own pricing page sets out three shapes. There is a free tier funded by donor tips, where the larger share of each tip stays with GalaBid rather than going to your cause. There is a Pro tier that charges a percentage of every transaction. And there is a paid flat fee per campaign. Stripe handles the card processing on all of them, and that cost sits on top for you to absorb or pass on.
Two things worth knowing before you compare. GalaBid publishes its prices in US dollars, so none of those figures is a UK quote. And UK supporters are alert to platform tipping, so a free tier that keeps most of the tip is worth reading closely. Our Zeffy vs GalaBid comparison has the current numbers side by side.
Your auction keeps everything it raises. A winning bid of £400 reaches your charity's bank account as £400, with no platform fee, no per-item fee and no card fee, however many lots you list. What funds Zeffy is a voluntary contribution bidders can add at checkout, shown on its own line with an amount they are free to lower or set to zero. Your total is the same either way. See how Zeffy stays free if you want the mechanics.
For collecting the money, yes. Zeffy's auction feature is built for online bidding that closes on a timer rather than an auctioneer calling bids, so the live part happens in the room as it always has. To take the money, set up a donation form and turn off the suggested amounts so only a custom amount box remains. Then charge each winner their hammer price with the free Tap to Pay app, or point them at the form's QR code. It has to be a donation form rather than your auction form, because Tap to Pay does not read auction forms. Your online auction still runs on the auction form, and both land in the same dashboard.
One thing to keep straight in your records: a hammer price is still payment for a lot rather than a gift, so it is not Gift Aid eligible even though it came in through a donation form.
Yes. Set your open date for the day you want bidding to start, then add your lots at whatever pace the donations come in. Nothing opens before that date, so the form can sit half-built without anyone bidding on a lot you have not finished describing.
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