Silent Auction Pro™ partners with two different card processing companies: Worldpay and CardConnect - both both industry leaders in PCI DSS compliant payment processing, to offer fully-integrated, secure state-of-the-art encrypted and cost-effective payment processing. Click here for a look at Worldpay and CardConnect transaction fees.

We offer direct integration to either Worldpay or CardConnect so that you are able to take card payments (and store card information required for mobile bidding).

In general there are no set-up fees or monthly maintenance fees to establish a merchant account with Worldpay or to establish a merchant account with CardConnect.

Please see our help page on credit card processing fees for more information on Worldpay and CardConnect transaction fees.

While you can use a credit card payment processor other than Worldpay or CardConnect, you will lose many important features that come with the integrated solution:

1. Accept Ticket Sales and Donations Online: Using the integrated credit card processing you automatically have a website via Silent Auction Pro™ through which you can sell tickets online and accept online cash donations. If you have your own website you can provide a simple link to your Silent Auction Pro™ page for accepting tickets and cash donations. Obviously you can do this with external merchant accounts and other ticketing systems but you do not get items 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 below.
2. Automatically Add Attendees via Online Ticket Purchases: When selling tickets online through Silent Auction Pro™, attendee information is automatically entered into your Contacts database through a simple reconciliation process. This eliminates duplicate data entry required when selling tickets online using an external process.
3. Support for Silent Auction Pro™ Online Bidding: Using the integrated credit card processing is a requirement to use Silent Auction Pro™'s Online Bidding component. This protects you by ensuring you get paid for items that are won online.
4. Ability to Pre-Authorize Attendee Credit Cards and offer Express Check-Out: This is a win-win for both you and your attendees. By pre-authorizing attendee credit cards you can quickly and efficiently process payments at the end of your event and have paid invoice receipts waiting for your Express Check-Out attendees. This way they don't have to wait in the check-out line. The advantage for your organization is if people leave the event without paying for the items on which they bid and won, you can choose to bill their credit card and let them know you have their items ready for them to pick up. This can significantly simplify the after auction workload. You will not have this using an external account.
5. Simple - One Step Check-Out: The integrated credit card processing in Silent Auction Pro™ offers you a simple one step check-out process where you can accept the credit card payment via the computer and immediately print out the attendee's paid invoice. Accepting credit cards outside of Silent Auction Pro™ requires multiple steps: Printing the attendee's invoice, Running the Credit Card, then Processing the Payment in Silent Auction Pro to mark the invoices as paid.
6. Swipe Credit Card Information Quickly and Securely via your Computers: Using the optional USB Credit Card Readers you can quickly and securely swipe credit card information directly into the computer for payment processing. This speeds up the check-out process and eliminates the risk of exposing your attendee credit card information by using a manual paper process. All card information is encrypted and sent via a secure connection.

If you are interested in using the features described above, the first step is to decide if you'd like to pursue an account with Worldpay or CardConnect (click here to view a comparison of their rate structure.

• Establish a Worldpay Merchant Account
• Establish a CardConnect Merchant Account

Monies charged on credit cards are posted to Worldpay or CardConnect's website immediately and then batched over to your bank account within 1-2 business days of the transaction. Note that charges posted the same day will be aggregated together and sent to your bank account as a single batch transaction. If for instance you received three payments on the same day, one $15, one $35 and one $50, your bank would see a $100 deposit. To reconcile that $100 deposit into the three individual transactions you can use Worldpay's iQ System / CardConnect CardPointe system that shows each batch amount with a link to drill down into the individual transactions.

The processing fees are automatically withdrawn from your account at the beginning of the month following the transaction.

Silent Auction Pro™ will invoice you for your event typically on the Thursday following your event date. The payment is due immediately and late 30 days after the invoice date. If you do not pay within the 30 days we will automatically charge the credit card you have on file.

If you are using the integrated credit card processing through Silent Auction Pro™ and Worldpay or CardConnect, you must use the appropriate card reader device as described here. For either processor, a USB card reader is required. Mobile phone plug-in devices do not work. Chip readers do not work.

Worldpay readers are encrypted with a Worldpay key to provide extra protection when scanning and sending card data through the Internet. Other card readers will not work if your Silent Auction Pro account is configured with Worldpay.

CardConnect readers are also specific to their processing platform. You must request card readers directly through CardConnect if you want to use a card reader at your event. Other card readers will not work if your Silent Auction Pro account is configured with CardConnect.

See our help page on credit card readers for more information.

As of October 2015 the credit card industry will begin providing incentives to merchants to use credit card readers that employ embedded microchip verification by assuming the liability for charges processed using the new EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) technology. Today - if you as a merchant accept a card counterfeit card or a card that was stolen, you are responsible for those charges. After October if you accept a card that was stolen you are still responsible - unless it was a counterfeit card with an EMV (chip embedded) and the transaction was run using an EMV reader. There is no mandate that all transactions be done using EMV and likely never will be as this would prevent billions of dollars of transactions that happen online today.

Until this becomes a mandated solution, we don't anticipate providing EMV based readers. Here's why:

1. Silent Auction Pro™'s customer base is almost 100% charitable organizations running fundraisers. The people who attend these type of events are generally community minded people, church members, school parents, etc. - not they type of people who are out trying to buy things on a stolen or counterfeited credit card.
2. We have never heard of charge backs happening to our customers - which really just reinforces the first point.
3. 80% or more of charges run through Silent Auction Pro™ are done using cards that have been entered by the customer themselves during an online purchase of tickets or perhaps signing up for online bidding. There is no EMV solution in this case because it's done by the customer through keying in their information through the website.
4. EMV based readers are almost 3 times as expensive as the non-EMV readers.This would increase the rental cost of the readers from $30 per reader to $90 per reader - an increase we think would not be well received by our customers - especially given that we believe the EMV solution is not necessary for the type of attendees to a typical charitable fundraiser.

Yes, unlike other systems we don't try to hold your data hostage. You can export almost anything from Silent Auction Pro™ to a CSV (Comma Separated Values) format that can be used to import into other systems. Any table you see in Silent Auction Pro™ may be easily copied and pasted into Excel or other spreadsheet systems by simply copying and pasting the data.

You can combine spouses / partners in one contact record but it is better to enter them separately as this improves your overall ability to communicate with your contacts. Most people have separate email addresses and phone numbers. By entering the spouses separately you can capture both persons data and use this when sending emails or perhaps calling them for any reason. While entering people separately in this way will assign separate bidder numbers, they are welcome to use either of their bidder numbers at your event

With your paid event, your data is automatically hosted on the Silent Auction Pro™'s server for one year from the date of that event. This means that all your contacts / donors / attendees information as well as all the donation data is in the system and ready to use for subsequent events. Additional hosting may be purchased at a nominal fee if your next event is more than a year away or if you are skipping a year and want to keep your data in the system.

With respect to the integrity of our servers, we have two servers and databases running in a master/slave configuration running on separate networks. Every transaction in the master is immediately replicated on the slave. We have automated systems in place - both internal and external - that constantly monitor the server and database health, and that will take corrective action if an issue is found. Obviously our technical support staff is also notified should this occur. If one server or database fails the system is designed to notify us and automatically fail-over to the back-up server / database.

We also do two daily back-ups of the entire database that are stored in a completely separate server / repository.

The other side of this is the Internet connection at your end. For obvious reasons we recommend that you verify the connection before hand and ideally have a systems / IT person on call in case you have a problem. We also recommend you have a back-up Internet connection option. This is very easy to do using a MiFi network running through a personal cell phone. Silent Auction Pro™ uses very little bandwidth and an entire event could easily be run through a MiFi cellular connection.

It is worth pointing out that if you have your data on a standalone machine, that machine could crash and you could lose all the data at any time. It also could get stolen, dropped, a glass of wine spilled on the keyboard, etc. The fact that Silent Auction Pro™ is running through the Internet and that you can access your data from any machine connected to the Internet and that it is backed up daily and also replicated on a separate server in our opinion makes it a much safer solution not to mention more flexible and convenient.

The support desk is available from 8am Eastern to 9pm Pacific - 7 days a week and is free to customers who have purchased the Bidsheet Plus™ or higher level packages. If you have issues the night of your event you are welcome to call. For non-critical support questions we ask that you refer first to the online help and/or training videos as those will answer 99% of the questions we typically receive. The number for technical support is (408) 583-4880 x2.

You may also email questions to technical support at support@silentauctionpro.com. Emails are checked frequently throughout the day and typical response times are within an hour.

Silent Auction Pro™ creates a specific number of bidding spots on your bid sheets and pre-prints the actual bid amounts on these spaces. While you may turn off the pre-printed bid amounts, we don't recommend that you do so, as this prevents bidders from breaking your minimum bid or bid increments. The "Max Bid" is used in conjunction with the Min Bid and Bid Increment to calculate the number of bidding spots. For those who like math, the formula for the number of spaces is: ((Max Bid - Min Bid)/Bid Increment) - Bid Increment, with the last bidding spot being the Buy It Now price if you are using Buy It Now. If you have an item that you want a higher maximumm bid, you may set this when creating the auction item. If you want an unlimited Max Bid then you should probably use the "Silent Auction - Priceless" and turn off the "Print Bid Amounts" option on the bid sheet, or create your own Auction Type. You will still need to enter a "Max Bid" in this case to allow the system to calculate an appropriate bidding increment.

Silent Auction Pro™ attempts to round the bid values to "nice" increments of $1, $5, $10, etc., depending on the value of the item, so the calculation of bid spots may be slightly off due to rounding.