OLA - Online Auction 4+

Good but not great. Somewhat buggy, poor search

Overall the app does the bare minimum. You can usually find interesting items, bid on them, get notified when outbid or win, and schedule pickup or delivery.

But it does glitch enough at the end of auctions that will sometimes miss out on an item you wanted.

Big flaw for me has been the very limited search capability. I get spoiled by apps that use a google-like search bar. Until today, the app would search for any item that contained any word in your search and often return items that did not. If you search for PAPER TOWEL, you would get everything that included paper or towel. Today, the search changed and now the phrase has to be exact. Somehow that’s worse. If I want a SOLO BONFIRE, I can’t search for both of those qualifiers without excluding items that may describe the item as solo stove bonfire. App needs to fix search to allow WORD & WORD. Or exact phrases only in quotes.

Can’t save filter settings

I love OLA but what annoys me about this app, is that you can’t save your filter settings. I have to literally filter and click to one pickup location each and every time I search something or any time I click an item, I have to constantly click that setting manually, because the other location is an hour away from me. I accidentally bought 2 items from the other location, and now have to try and find a way over there or I risk forfeiting the items and I’m out the money spent. This is extremely annoying and somewhat predatory. It almost seems as if OLA wants you to accidentally buy from another pickup location so that they can get some ones for free if you don’t pickup. Because you have to be blind to not see that issue when using the app.

Also, items need to be broken up into categories such as “cleaning” , “tech” , “tools” etc. this will make searching products so much easier for users and will likely lead to more products being sold for more money. I have noticed that in auctions, there are 3 of the same items. 1 is being sold for significantly higher than the other two, and that’s because people see that item first when scrolling down the item list. If these items were broken up into categories, and people searched by categories, then each of the 3 identical items would be selling for more. People aren’t finding the other items as easily.

Overall the app is promising but needs to be more user friendly.

Developer Response ,

We do not want our bidders stuck with items that they cannot pickup. We want to sell items to people who want them and have the ability to retrieve them. We understand the frustration you’re voicing, which is why one of the first major updates we implemented was saving filters like you’re requesting. You can now choose a location or delivery preference and set it as your default. Please make sure you’re using the latest version of the app to notice this difference.

Good deals, app could be improved

My husband and I get things through OLA all the time. I understand that they are a salvage company and I don’t expect the app to be out of this world amazing or anything. I would just like to see their search capabilities upgraded. Right now, you have to type in very specific keywords to find anything. You cannot search by category like “pets” or “furniture” and expect to see anything close to the whole catalog. Also, the search thinks that I’m only typing in part of the word and will show me a bunch of options unrelated to my search. For example, if I search “cat toys”, the app will pull up a ton of options that start with the letters C-A-T so I’ll have to manually scroll through games of Catan or Quick Catch Tuna (C-A-Tch) when I wasn’t asking the app to show me these things. It also doesn’t know that I ONLY want CAT toys, not every single kids toy on the app. Very frustrating. I wish they would upgrade the search feature to be a more smart search that understands when I type two words separated by a space, I am looking for those two words together, specifically. It would be a huge help if they just had categories so I could see all the kids items, kitchen items, bathroom items, etc. Instead, you better know exactly the right words that they used in the title or else you’ll never find what you’re looking for. Because of this, it unfortunately makes browsing very tedious and annoying.