New Releases

Handbid Releases 2.19: Guest List Updates, Pre-sale Items in Preview Mode and Many More New Features!

New features include bidder ID on Guest List, reporting, sell at presale and more
New features include bidder ID on Guest List, reporting, sell at presale and more

While many of you were taking some well-deserved time off and stuffing your bellies with Turkey and Cranberry Sauce, our team at Handbid quietly pushed out a silent auction software release.  

It has been a few months from our last major release which is not typical for us, but we have been so busy with auctions this fall that we felt it would be best to wait until things slowed down.

So this one is a larger release than normal.  In fact, this release contains  176 improvements and bug fixes! So how is that for progress!?  What is in this release? Read below for the highlights

Handbid's New Features Update

Guest List now defaults to not assigning Bidder Numbers

One thing we observed over the last 6 months of customers using our guest list was that the default setting of assigning a paddle number to each imported guest created some confusion.  So, we have changed the guest list to no longer assign paddle numbers when you import new guests into the guest list. In addition, Handbid no longer assigns a paddle number to guest slots generated from ticket sales. 

For those of you who don't use physical bidder cards at your event, this change won't have any impact on you. For those of you that do, this change should make it easier to distribute bidder cards at your event as guests arrive.  It will also save a few trees in the process. I think the Lorax would appreciate that.

If you are the type that prefers to pre-assign paddle numbers, no worries, you can still do that when you import your guest list.  You can read up on how to best prepare your data and optionally import your guests in this knowledge base article.  

Changes to "Add Bidder Dialogue”

We have added some helpful changes to the add bidder process. Prior to this change, you could only search your contacts when adding a bidder to your auction. Now when you go to add a bidder to your auction, you have the ability to search your guest list and invite list as well.

While you can lookup guests from here, we still recommend that you run your check-in from the guest list screen  as you can check in multiple people (an entire party) at once.

Want to determine the best way to run a check-in with Handbid?  

Read this knowledge base article for our recommendation.

 



You can now identify bidders that are already on the guest list

You will now be able to see an icon next to a bidder's name in the bidder list that indicates they are on your guest list. Whether you sell tickets through Handbid or import your guest list you will find this feature handy as you can clearly see which guests have registered as bidders when looking at the guest list.

 

For sale items marked "Sell at Presale” can now be sold in Preview mode

You asked and we delivered. The same "for sale” items that were sold in presale status can now be purchased by your bidders when the auction is in preview mode. This means that you can have presale items available for sale while your silent and live auction items are visible.

 

Improvements to iPhone login links

We love to hate security policies right?  Password rules, security lines at the airport, and retina scans and passcodes are all here to stay whether we like it or not.  After-all, we realize the purpose of those things is to keep us (and our data) safe. The same is true here at Handbid. Our security policies are in place to not only adhere to credit card security and data privacy laws, but also to make sure your bidders information remains as safe as possible.

As a result, those login links we send out MUST expire after a certain period of time.  So if you have a bidder who uses a login link and then later tries to use it again, it is likely to have expired.  While this can be frustrating, we don't have a lot of choice there. However, we can make it easier to get a new one, and we have done that in our latest iPhone release.  Now when your bidder's login link has expired, they will have the option to request a new one directly from their phone and get right back into the app where they left off.

 

Now you can justify your text in the event description

This was a small enhancement that was loudly requested by a few of you.  Prior to this release you had no ability to center or right justify any of your text in your event description. This was because our front-end web technology would strip out those tags.  We have worked around that now and added that capability back in. So, you now have the ability to format your text in the event description field. See below for the options to center your text, left-justified or right justified.  

 

Swap paddles in the guest list

Just to give you even more flexibility around your paddle numbers we've made it so you can swap paddle numbers right from the guest list. You could always swap paddle numbers from the bidder list but now you can swap paddles for registered bidders in your guest list. If you have deleted guests with preassigned paddles in your guest list, you can also swap for those deleted numbers. Select a bidder in the guest list, select the paddle swap icon and you can then choose the number you want to swap with. Goodbye paddle number headaches!

 

Reporting

  • We noticed that our purchases report no longer showed all item types in the export.  For those of you pivot table gurus, that was super annoying. So we added those back!
  • Also, our purchases report did a really lousy job of showing every transaction if a us re purchased more than one at the same time. That is fixed too!  
  • Our category performance report made a valiant attempt to calculate performance on tickets.  Well, that really didn't seem to make sense, so we pulled that out. In addition, we improved how it calculated performance on for Sale items. We think the report is much more useful. Hopefully you will agree.

Foreign Currency Fixes

  • We found some formatting issues related to foreign currencies that ranged from how the goals were presented to how it displayed the currency symbol.  Yes, we realize that $ can mean something different in different countries, so now most of our currencies should show CA$, US$, NZ$, AU$, etc. Sorry about that earlier confusion Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong!  All better now we hope.

 

Issue sharing auction URL on Twitter

When sharing the the auction from the event's website, Twitter was rejecting the URL. That should be working now.  Sorry about that Twitter fans.

 

Paused auctions now show up in the Auction Dashboard

So you would pause your auction (which is not a common practice) and it would then disappear off the dashboard.  Oops. It was still there but you could not find it because we did not have a filter for it at the top. So we added that in and defaulted it to "on” so those paused auctions won't disappear anymore.  Since we were on a roll, we went ahead and defaulted closed auctions to show as well.

 

Fixes to the Mobile Splash and Event Homepage Sponsors

We know you all love to recognize your sponsors both on the web and in the apps.  With a previous release we had made that more difficult with an issue that prevented you from updating the Mobile Splash text.  Sorry! Fixed!

We also added in a really cool feature (we probably should have included this above). Now your web sponsors can also show up on your HandbidTV ticker.  When you add in your web sponsor, Handbid will now show them on Handbid TV! See below for an example of what thay may look like (yes, the gradient background is customizable).  

 

Resetting your password now unlocks your accounts

Users that lock themselves out of their accounts due to unsuccessful login attempts can now unlock their own account when they recover their password!  Our support team is super excited about this!

 

Auction managers can purchase tickets without a credit card on file

No more having to toggle the credit card requirement when adding tickets for your bidders who don't have a card on file. The system now lets managers override that requirement.  .

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Well those were the overall highlights from our 176 improvements we made in this release.  If you have any questions about some of these new enhancements; or, if you have any suggestions of your own, please reach out to us at service@handbid.com!

 

Thank you,

 

The Handbid Product Team - Handbid is the sleekest, most intuitive mobile app available for making silent auctions more fun, accessible, game-like and profitable.

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