subject: Quibids Or Beezid - My View On The World Of Penny Auctions [print this page] The world of the auction has gotten more and more accessible throughout the last decade. First, auctions used to exist only in auction houses, places that were only welcoming to those people who had the time and funds to be present at an event where things of rarity were being sold.
Then, eBay sprang onto the scene in the nineties and brought the auction into our living rooms using the wonder of the internet. Anything from Jimmy Choo shoes to old used TV set were available to anyone, in any price range, as long as you had an email address and the use of internet.
Now the world of online auctions is changing again. Penny auctions are the new thing. Quibids.com, Beezid.com, SwipeAuctions.com- they all promise buying expensive, luxurious electronics for unbelievably low prices. Why are the prices so unbelievably low? Because they are a lie.
Well, ok, maybe lie is a bit harsh, but the prices are severely misrepresented. Saying that you can buy a two hundred dollar iPod for only twenty dollars sounds amazing. But the truth is that each bid you place in a penny auction - in increments of one penny - cost users anywhere between fifty cents and one dollar per bid.
Per bid. In one penny increments? So the twenty dollar iPod suddenly becomes an iPod that was bid on two thousand times. And if each of those two thousand times cost fifty cents each, the twenty dollar iPod which was originally a two hundred dollar iPod just cost the people bidding on it one thousand dollars. In my view, that is a scam.
Now, to be fair, people who win items on Quibids.com or Beezid.com certainly are not bidding the entire time by themselves, and probably not with only one or two other people either. And the person who wins the iPod probably ended up paying less than retail price for it. So that is nice for them.
But what about all the other people who bid? They may have spent up to eighty or one hundred dollars paying for a chance to win this iPod, and when the clock runs out and they are no longer able to bid, they are simply out their money.
That sounds more like a slot machine than an auction in my view. When you bid on eBay or at an auction house, if you lose the bidding war you keep your money. Not so at a penny auction. So if you think it is not a scam to pay eighty dollars simply for the chance of winning something, and then having nothing to show for it at the end, then maybe penny auctions are for you.
