Best Practices: Before the Event

Check the Venue:

Verify if the venue of your event has adequate cell phone coverage – a small number of places may be in a deep basement or experience poor signal strength. If the venue offers Wi-Fi coverage, add that information to what is displayed for guests (on tables, next to items, etc.)
Guests at a golf tournament may use their phones through the day, and then have little battery life left when they get to the clubhouse - consider renting a charging station or two.

Items:

Consider having “experiences” or “intangibles” as auction items. Items like priority parking spots at venues, best seats in the house or seating with special guests can't be valued so tend to go for higher amounts.
Quality items will generate more revenue than a large quantity of average items. It is possible to have too many items versus the number of guests. Review what items from prior years were popular and discard ones that did not generate much interest.
Consider not including the “value” of a retail item in your listings (e.g. if you show that an item can be bought for a specific price, then it is unlikely that patrons will bid any higher than the value you show.) Of course, items like a $100 gift card can't avoid having the value shown!
Consider multi-sale items for a fixed fee. Items like seats on a mini-bus to an event can be special and limited to only the first few purchasers. Once they run out, no more are available.
Time-Saver: Create an online Google Form to have the donors of items enter their own information (Donor Name, Item Title, Item Description, Item Value, Item or Donor URL) - you get accurate information and it populates directly to a spreadsheet that you can edit (add lot number, starting bid and minimum increment) then bulk upload to MobilBid.

Pre-Registration:

Collect guest names, cell phone numbers and/or email addresses prior to the event, load them into the system and broadcast an “invite” to them by text and/or email – they don't have to sign themselves in, saving a step in the process.

Warm Up your Guests:

Any pre-event communications to your guests can mention that bidding will be done by smartphone - “bring a fully charged phone!” We've heard of some events offering charging stations.

Information to Display:

Tent cards can be placed on each guest table, and next to items on display, informing guests how they can access and sign up for the auction on their mobile phones. Options include a local phone number to text to (best), or a short URL that guests can type in to their mobile web browser (if someone can't get the phone number option to work.)
While the vast majority of guests will have a smartphone, there is a chance that someone will not. Suggest they tell guest to "find a friend" to bid for them and split the payment afterwards. Arrange to have a handful of volunteer “attendants” who can sign guests up using the attendant mode on an iPad or their own phone and inform the administrator who can place bids and maximum bid settings on behalf of any guest. We suggest one volunteer for each 200 guests, but it may vary depending on the audience.

Testing, Testing Testing:

Do a full test (make a duplicate) prior to your first event, so that you can confirm that all the labels, messaging and images are what you expect, and that you are comfortable with the system functions to set the start and end times, display leaderboards, generate invoices and send out end-of-auction notifications.
Test that your Stripe account is set up in live mode, and accepting payments. You can see the Live/Test status on your auction dashboard, and perform a $1 test payment from the Organization Settings on the right-hand menu.