Full FeedPay to bid? Meet swoopo.com
New to the US market is swoopo.com an auction site, but not one like you know and hate love like eBay. No, swoopo is a very different and interesting concept. The price you pay is the cost of bidding plus the ending final price. Confused?
Each bid costs $1. Yes, you pay to bid. You can buy bids in groups of 20 up to 500. So every time you bid, you are charged $1. Now the flip side of this is the prices are very low on goods. For example, a 2nd gen 8gb iPod touch just went for $73.80 (final sales price, who knows how much that person spent in bids to claim it). They seem stocked with lots of gadgets, laptops and even jewelry.
But wait, there is more
It gets more interesting. The rules are bids are increased in $0.15 increments. So, that iPod grossed the site $565.65 (final sales price divided by the number of bids plus sales price). Each bid pushes back the auction timer 15 seconds giving others a chance to respond to the bid. Bidding starts for each product at $0.15, which is figured into the above equation.
It looks like the company will do OK. Getting paid $565.65 for a $229 product says there is some power in this model.
Scammers?
Like anything though, some people believe it is a scam.
“This site is a complete joke! It is just a big SCAM. I stared at the counter until it went down to 1 second hit bid, and NOPE I didn’t win…”
One commenter on that complaint site says swoopo isn’t a scam, and he himself had won several laptops at amazing prices.
Buyer beware. Let us know in the comments if anyone gives this a whirl. Math majors only, please.
Site [Swoopo.com]
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WOW this is insane. Swoopo more than likely has their own bidders to keep people bidding. This is a very smart way to make money because there are so many people lacking in intelligence who gamble to win and loose lots of money. Just think about it, $1 to per bet and only raises the bid in $.15 incrementals…
on November 20, 2008 at 07:17 PM - LINKGo ahead keep on loosing those bets one dollar at a time while Swoopo rolls in the dough.
Certainly a gambling website. I like to buy and sell items to turn a profit and this website will have you in the red. You’re not going to win unless you’re very lucky or if you spend more bidding than the item is worth (which is actually losing, right?). I mean, some of the winners are getting extremely good deals; but, I’ve looked at this from every angle and can’t figure out any sure ways to win, aside from the obvious: find one with few bidders. Its a lottery all the way. Somehow you just have to get lucky and have the time run out with your bid up there. I would suggest using this only if you’re feeling REALLY lucky and there are no casinos nearby. My best idea was waiting until the price seems like it won’t go higher and then bidbutler your lot of bids (doesn’t work). This method is also likely to cause you and some other poor bastards to lose your money (invested bids and reluctance to quit). God damn geniuses…
on November 22, 2008 at 05:46 PM - LINKI know of a site with a similar idea. But this one is legit and not misleading. Its pretty simple. You pay for limited bid spots then submit your silent bid. High bid wins. It may be worth trying.
http://www.bidspot.us
on November 24, 2008 at 02:51 AM - LINKHey guys,
I hope you’re all doing well. Just wanted to give you a heads up on a sale that I’m having on my Swoopo ebook. Feel free to check it out, let me know if you have any questions… etc. I will be raising the price back up because it’s filled with tons of great information, so I just wanted to let you guys know about the sale.
Hope you’re all having good luck with Swoopo.
Cheers,
on November 25, 2008 at 06:43 PM - LINKDave :)
Actually there are real people who are winning in http://www.yellmann.com , its all about manipulating the bidding, theres a little bit of mental game in it as well. shouldn’t be so negative about the website just because you don’t know how to play it. it does feel a bit bogus, but you have to understand that £.1 per bid allows for the site to sell the items for a lot less, considering that the £.1000 auction giveaway registers almost £.10, 000 worth in bids, making this auction 10 fold effective. You have to look at it like everyone pitching in a little bit here and there allowing you or someone else to purchase said item for a cheap price, almost like a drawing. The other thing on the site to look for is the items less interesting, if you go for the laptops, or the £.1, 000 cash prize, these will have a lot of interest, and take hours upon hours of additional bids to finish the auctions. Go for the less desired prizes and you might be able to get something. Also… if you look at some of the auctions, some people are bidding £.600 worth plus the price on a single auction, which doesn’t make sense to me, but they end up losing money, i’d say… let them. It’s all about waiting and learning how it works !
on November 26, 2008 at 05:02 AM - LINKTo me, SWOOPO is nothing more than a betting site with the last one win the product. I am surprise that so far nobody take any action on this, especially online getting is illegal here in the US, at least that is my understanding anyway. First, you buy the token to bet on the product and along the way if you win then good you pay for that price (hope that you still come out ahead) if not you loose all your token and time to buy some more.
on November 26, 2008 at 03:59 PM - LINKNotice no response from the swoopo CEO who was attempting to deflect blows. I think it’s great that they thought of a way to get sweet amounts of money out of people and still come across as selling items at discounted prices. I just wish they did it lawfully.
on November 28, 2008 at 05:38 AM - LINKI just heard of swoopo today. Joined and won my first auction. Now I’m leary of claiming my Wii Fit. If you win, does the merchandise really arrive?
on December 5, 2008 at 05:46 PM - LINKHi Ty,
It really does work! I’m curious, how easily did you win your auction?
Thanks!
-Dave
http://www.beatswoopo.com
on December 5, 2008 at 06:54 PM - LINKIf they want to run a gambling site they should say so, instead of pretending to be a bona fide auction site. I suppose it’s a case of buyer beware, but unfortunately many people will sign up and buy bidpacks without really understanding how little chance they have of winning anything.
on December 10, 2008 at 09:05 PM - LINKThe only part of this auction that isn’t like customary online auctions is 1) Pay per bid. and 2) Different regions of people bidding on different items of different values being unknowingly pitted against one another.
If the items were truly comparable (relatively equal in value) that would be one thing. But there are hundreds of dollars difference here. My opponent could be bidding on a Lexus and effectively taking me to the cleaners on a Hyundai. (Extreme example I know but you get the idea.) The retail value of items drives the bidding structure of an auction. If everyone is bidding on different values then we consumers are fighting a battle against unknown foes with unknown motivations.
I am familiar with gambling. I understand that the house gets it in the end. But even casinos don’t act like this and that says something. It’s like having a guy at table 31 going “all in” and raising the stakes for table 32. Not to mention he had to pay a dollar to make that bet.
on December 11, 2008 at 03:33 PM - LINKI read how the “auction” worked and then searched swoopo+ scam and then swoopo+ripoff and got no hits in search results. I guess Google was taking the day off.
I gave it a shot and ran afoul of the bid butler which is my biggest complaint. I asked the people at Swoopo to review my bid butler bids. No satisfaction.
I then registered the domain :
http://www.swoopo-scam.com
to put out my warnings on the system. It is now my mission.
More hits in Google now, that’s all I can say.
on December 11, 2008 at 03:53 PM - LINK***Disclaimer - I work for Swoopo***
@Harold - when you mentioned that you asked the people at Swoopo to review your BidButler bids, did anyone respond to you? You stated above, “No Satisfaction.”
I want to make sure that your email inquiry into our system was handled properly.
on December 11, 2008 at 03:59 PM - LINK@Harold
So far I have heard from people I have been in contact with that Swoopo is very good at responding. Be careful if you go into an auction and are going against another bid butler. Here is what I have seen. When there are two BBs going against eachother, it will rocket through the number of bids you have allocated for that auction. The theory behind this is that it will drive the price up so high that other single bidders won’t bid anymore. So, I totally understand why Swoopo would do this. If that’s not the reason why they do that, it’s purely technology. I don’t have the technical know-how to say if they can know when that bid should be placed and if it’s placed immediately, they know it is being put in at the right time, not waiting for a single bid to come in. So, understand how it works and think it through. If they have your bid butler wait, it won’t really be a bid butler make a decision and it will wait too long, decreasing your chances of winning.
Hope that makes sense. Let me know if you have any questions. Feel free to contact me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or visit the site linked in my name or at the bottom of the post.
Cheers,
on December 11, 2008 at 04:08 PM - LINKDave
Wow, this is a great auction site in time for the holidays!
on December 20, 2008 at 01:35 PM - LINKCheck this out!!!
http://www.swoopo.co.uk/auction/300-freebids-voucher/138992.html
£120 of swoopo bids went for near on 2 1/4 times its value. And people say it aint a scam lol - anyone on this planet know anyone that would pay that much?
on December 31, 2008 at 11:54 AM - LINKre: ICE 12/31
That person who bought that 120 of bids only spent $2.80 on the auction. Look at the number of bids they placed. It’s a 100% off auction, so they don’t pay the final price.
Still not a scam. :)
on December 31, 2008 at 12:41 PM - LINKWhile a vast majority of the “auctions” seem legit, there’s always going to be those few that are beyond belief, which taint the legitimacy of all of them.
http://www.swoopo.co.uk/auction/300-freebids-voucher/129217.html
After all, it makes more sense to only scam now and then and keep your business going, than to scam all the time and be out of business in a month.
on December 31, 2008 at 02:28 PM - LINKI just found the site. My opinion is that it is not a scam…an opinion.
Why I believe that? Look at the “business model’. They make their money on people bidding. Who cares how much the final price is on the winning bid, right? It make sense, yet?
Here is the example I’m confronting. Either a MacBook 13” or Nikon D90. Both about 1299.00 US.
1, Pay to Bid. Sounds great to me! Why? It’s a disinsentive for people to ‘throw around’ bids. It filters out the less motivated buyers, right? It’s good for me…almost.
2, Time roll back… It’s crap for me, as a buyer. It reopens up the bid for other’s to ‘snipe’ my last bid. I can -almost- tolerate this one. It’s very annoying but I can live with it.
3, Penny bid…this is the one bull sh!t which I can’t stand. To buy a Macbook or a D90 at a “good value” (my opinion it would be well under 800.00), 800.00 as an example. 100 bids = 100 pennies = 1.00US bid price and 75.00 (their fee earned from people bidding).
1000bids = 10.00 bid price and 750.00 (Swoopo’s fee at .75 cost per bid) 10.00 is still a GREAT deal.
10,000bids = 100.00 sales price and earning Swoopo a nice 75,000.00 US on a 1,299.00 item (the Nikon D90 or the Apple’s MacBook). Not bad profit, right?
And if the selling price (what I still consider a ‘good deal’) is 800.00, then 80,000 bids were made. At a cost of .75 per bid, it would gross Swoopo a nice 60,000.00US!
Apparently, there are many people who are frustrated (me, for example….but I haven’t signed up for Swoopo, I am researching this) enough to not even bother with this system…
The Pay to Bid is redundant from an economic stand point. The rising prices should filter out the less motivated buyers. The Pay to Bid system put up an even bigger psychological barrier for many people… “why should I pay to have the priviledge of attempting to buy?”
The Time Roll Back… I can almost live with this. It’s market’s ‘natural forces’. The “Going once, Going Twice, Going, Going, Gone! Sold!”
The Penny Bid sh!t is what I don’t like. As a motivated buy who researched what a ‘good cost’ is, I would instantly throw in 800.00US on a 1299.00 item. Knowing Apple, the Macbook will be close to 1,100.00. Nikon will be close to 900.00.
The Penny Bid artificially forces people to run out their blocks of Bids that was pre-purchased. The Penny Bid force a higher bid count, insuring Swoopo to earn their .75 US per bid.
If an item were to be bid up to 75% of it’s value (about 800.00US of the 1299.00), Swoopo will earn +45x their initial investment of the 1299.00.
on January 3, 2009 at 02:34 AM - LINKSwoopo… my opinion: it’s interesting. Would I join and attempt to buy something? ONly if I have more data on people’s bidding habbits. None of us likes to loose nor do we like to feel ‘scammed’. Pay to Bid in conjunction with the Penny Bid are frustrating combination they are inflicting on the users.
I just did a one month analysis of an Apple Macbook on Swoopo. I found that Swoopo is profiting about 200% of the value of items delivered. This was only a small field for comparison - based solely on 1 month (December) of auctions for the same brand/model laptop. My findings were that on one item, in 49 auctions, Swoopo pocketed more than $127,000.
There were some interesting finds, such that they only come out ahead on roughly 50% of all auctions. However, those auctions they profit on include several that earned over 20x the wholesale value of the actual computer. On said Macbooks, the bids on the auction only need to reach $12.83 for them to make one penny. Everything beyond that is pure profit. The average value I found was $51.90. This meant that they grossed and average $3894.15 from all the bids placed (@.75 each) plus the $51.90 average ending price. That brings the average gross to $3946.05, and once you take out the cost of the item at Retail Value ($1299) they netted about $2647.08.
Further example, one auction sold for $0.92. This combined with the profit from bids brought the gross to $69.92. Factor in the cost of the laptop, and Swoopo LOST $1228.92. However, this is completely offset by the auctions such as the one ended on 12.01.08. This auction finished at 248.03, which means they stood to gross over 18602.25 (@.75 each)from bidding alone. Then add in the final value of the computer, 248.03, and you have a gross of 18850.28. Factor in the Retail value of the computer, and they netted a $17,551.28 profit.
I think it is pretty clear they are not losing money, however there is a chance to win a laptop at an extremely low value. The lowest I found was the winner of the $0.92 auction. When it was all said and done, shipping included, he had a 1299 dollar laptop for about $26.14. Just don’t be like user Deafdlg and actually bid so high that the cost of bids are 200 more than the actual value of the computer.
If you would like to see more of my findings, and a complete table showing said findings, please view the pdf I published. Not all values are perfect, I already noticed an error in one field after I published the file, however most of them are spot on.
Swoopo.pdf]http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/2184751_j4kfy/Swoopo.pdf]Swoopo.pdf
on January 3, 2009 at 09:21 AM - LINKif you are reading this you know swoopo is a dishonst business. But it probably will not get shut down. But you can certainly take action to help lessen their profit. Complaint to Paypal. urge them to stop working with swoopo.
on January 4, 2009 at 01:21 PM - LINKI keep seeing folk saying that swoopo could be running bidding bots but I find this highly doubtful. The same things were said about poker sites back in the beginning and while it IS possible I find it deeply unlikely for one simple reason. If they can make money hand over fist by running it honestly then why risk it being shut down by breaking the law? There is absolutely no benefit to them going crooked because they would kill the golden goose if found out.
In saying that I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole but I admire the way they have come up with a legally non-gambling casino.
on January 6, 2009 at 05:38 AM - LINKDon’t trust anyone who owns both the website AND the merchandise you are bidding on. It is way to easy to be scammed and for them to scam you.
on January 8, 2009 at 09:32 AM - LINKHi,
I am just curious if any of the readers here have actually been scammed. Not trying to start an argument, just curious.
In all hopes of no replies,
on January 8, 2009 at 10:16 AM - LINKDave
Hey Dave, I don’t think most people here, when they say scam, mean it as they have personally been scammed. I think it’s meant more as the possibility of being scammed is very much there. Even if there are no actual scams occurring, there is a surplus of idiotic bidders on this site. Just look through their bid history and take a look at some of the people who saved 0%, some people use an outrageously high number of bids to the point where they are far exceeding the cost of the item in bids alone.
A lot of people will see that and think there’s no way someone could be that dumb, myself included, but I guess it happens. My viewpoint on it is that while there is no proof of scamming, it’s still a crapshoot. Do you really want to wind up bidding against someone willing to spend twice the item’s worth in bids?
Again, as far as I know, no legitmate proof of scams exists, but there are several “unusual” circumstances that make one question the validity of some of the auctions. I posted this one just a few responses ago, but here’s one of the best examples I have of this issue:
Swoopo.pdf]Swoopo.pdf]http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/2184751_j4kfy/Swoopo.pdf]Swoopo.pdf
on January 8, 2009 at 11:36 AM - LINK