Silent Auctions at Golf Outings: Should You Use an Online Bidding Platform?

Online bidding platforms took off during COVID, when in-person mingling wasn't an option and every event had to find a workaround. Years later, a lot of golf outings are still using them out of habit, and for most of them, the honest answer is that they shouldn't be.

The Short Answer: No, for Most Golf Outings

In most cases, a golf outing's silent auction is better run the old-fashioned way: a table of items, a pen, and a bid sheet. Not because the technology doesn't work, but because it solves a problem golf outings don't actually have, while creating a new barrier that costs you sales.

Why the Phone Becomes a Barrier, Not a Convenience

Think about where your golfers are mentally by the time the auction opens. They've just finished five hours on the course. It's happy hour. They want a drink, a plate of food, and to talk to their foursome about the round, not to pull out their phone and start scrolling through a bidding app.

You should be thinking about your silent auction the same way you think about raffle ticket sales: it's a revenue stream that depends on how easy it is to buy, not how sophisticated the technology is. Nothing is easier than walking past a table, seeing something you want, and writing your name and a number on a bid sheet. An app, even a good one, adds a step, a login, a barrier between the golfer and the purchase. Every extra step is a chance for someone to decide it's not worth the effort and walk away without bidding at all.

Where Online Platforms Actually Work Well

This isn't a case against online bidding platforms generally. They're genuinely well suited to a different kind of event. A gala or a beef-and-beer dinner is built around mingling: guests are there specifically to socialize, eat, and bid, often as couples, with no round of golf competing for their attention or their energy. In that setting, pulling out a phone to bid between conversations fits naturally into what people are already there to do.

A golf outing is a different animal. The golf itself is the main event, and the auction is a side activity competing for attention from people who are tired, socializing, and not in browsing mode.

The Volume Problem Nobody Mentions

Galas often justify the platform because they're managing dozens of items and need a system to track bids and process a large volume of post-event payments efficiently. Most golf outings simply don't have that problem. The number of silent auction items is usually modest enough that collecting payment isn't the bottleneck. What actually matters far more than bidding technology is whether you can accept credit cards at checkout, since that's where sales are genuinely lost if golfers can't pay easily.

The Non-Attendee Myth

A common reason charities adopt an online platform is the hope that supporters who can't attend the outing will still bid remotely, adding incremental revenue. In practice, this rarely plays out the way organizers expect. Non-attendee bidding tends to be minimal. Most of your actual auction revenue still comes from the people physically standing in front of the items, not from people bidding from home on something they'll never see in person.

The Fee Nobody Budgets For

Most online bidding platforms charge a service fee, typically somewhere in the 1–5% range of what's raised. For a gala managing tens of thousands of dollars in auction revenue, that fee may be easy to justify against the convenience it provides. For a typical golf outing's more modest auction total, that percentage often isn't worth what it buys you, especially once you factor in that the platform may be suppressing bids in the first place by adding friction.

Our rough rule of thumb, after helping hundreds of these events: roughly 90% of golf outings are better off without an online bidding platform for their silent auction.

The Exception: Large, High-End Outings

There's a real exception to this, and it's worth naming clearly rather than treating this as an absolute rule. A high-end outing drawing 144–280 golfers, plus another 50–100 dinner-only guests, isn't really one event. It's two. The golf is one event. The evening reception is, functionally, its own gala happening to be attached to a golf outing. At that scale, with that many non-golfing dinner guests mingling specifically to bid and socialize, an online platform starts to make the same sense it would at a standalone gala.

What to Prioritize Instead, for Most Outings

If you're in the roughly 90% of outings where a bid sheet and pen genuinely outperforms an app, the thing actually worth investing in is making checkout painless once the auction closes: accepting credit cards and mobile payments at the table, without forcing golfers back onto their phones to do it. That's the part of the process that's still worth solving with technology; the bidding itself usually isn't.