Stay away from penny auction websites!

[TheOrcKing]

You may have seen on TV or sometimes when you're surfing the web, ads for sites like QuiBids.com or Beezid.com. If not, then put simply these penny auction sites promote themselves as giving people the ability to bid on a brand new item straight from the manufacturer's warehouse and in the end the winner pays insanely little for said item, like say getting an iPad for $24. When that is very VERY far from the truth.

The way how these sites work is every time you click on the bid button for an item, you bid one cent. There is no way to change your bid amount at all, this is set in stone. And for every penny you bid with, they charge 60 cents up to a dollar to your credit card whether you win or not! So that supposed $24 iPad in reality cost you $1,440-$2,400! (Assuming you even 'won' it.) And an new iPad costs like, what, $500?

At least with eBay, the seller and buyer are two different parties, and the auction is monitored by the website. With these penny auction websites; however, there is no third party. They are both the seller and the auctioneer. Plus, they are not an approved retailer for anything! Which means any item you receive from them, the warranty is null & void. That is assuming you even do get the item at all. I've read pages of complaints of never receiving the item, and if they do there is something wrong with it or it's broken or doesn't work or not even the item they bid on in the first place!

Oh yeah, and not to mention the sites 'bots' that always outbid you on everything. Soon as you bid, somehow there always is the same three or four bidders on everything that always outbid you.

If you're like me, you too probably thought these kind of sites were bulls***.

But before I did this rant of mine, I needed to research and find out just how high they stacked the s*** up.

Pretty DAMN high it seems.

Honestly, you'd have a better chance playing & winning the slots than ever get a deal from a penny auction website.

[Darth Lego]

You may have seen on TV or sometimes when you're surfing the web, ads for sites like QuiBids.com or Beezid.com. If not, then put simply these penny auction sites promote themselves as giving people the ability to bid on a brand new item straight from the manufacturer's warehouse and in the end the winner pays insanely little for said item, like say getting an iPad for $24. When that is very VERY far from the truth.

The way how these sites work is every time you click on the bid button for an item, you bid one cent. There is no way to change your bid amount at all, this is set in stone. And for every penny you bid with, they charge 60 cents up to a dollar to your credit card whether you win or not! So that supposed $24 iPad in reality cost you $1,440-$2,400! (Assuming you even 'won' it.) And an new iPad costs like, what, $500?

At least with eBay, the seller and buyer are two different parties, and the auction is monitored by the website. With these penny auction websites; however, there is no third party. They are both the seller and the auctioneer. Plus, they are not an approved retailer for anything! Which means any item you receive from them, the warranty is null & void. That is assuming you even do get the item at all. I've read pages of complaints of never receiving the item, and if they do there is something wrong with it or it's broken or doesn't work or not even the item they bid on in the first place!

Oh yeah, and not to mention the sites 'bots' that always outbid you on everything. Soon as you bid, somehow there always is the same three or four bidders on everything that always outbid you.

If you're like me, you too probably thought these kind of sites were bulls***.

But before I did this rant of mine, I needed to research and find out just how high they stacked the s*** up.

Pretty DAMN high it seems.

Honestly, you'd have a better chance playing & winning the slots than ever get a deal from a penny auction website.

It is basically a scam anyway you look at it...

[pickleboy]

I think the people who made these websites are effing brilliant and I am mad I didn't think of the idea. I am shocked they don't have more of them. As long as there are no bots and you get the item then I do not see the problem other than they are hard to win.

[cflannagan]

I think the people who made these websites are effing brilliant and I am mad I didn't think of the idea. I am shocked they don't have more of them.

As long as there are no bots and you get the item then I do not see the problem other than they are hard to win.

Took me a minute to run it thru my head - damn, the site must be raking in mad $$$ for something that is worth much lesser than the total the site received from all those bids!

Does those so-called auctions expire at a fixed time, or is it something where a timer is reset anytime one bids onto that item, prolonging the auction end time?

[cflannagan]

The way how these sites work is every time you click on the bid button for an item, you bid one cent. There is no way to change your bid amount at all, this is set in stone. And for every penny you bid with, they charge 60 cents up to a dollar to your credit card whether you win or not! So that supposed $24 iPad in reality cost you $1,440-$2,400! (Assuming you even 'won' it.) And an new iPad costs like, what, $500?

Cost the winner $1,440-$2,400? I'm trying to understand the site - but I believe all the "losing bidders", including "winning bidder" contributes to cost of the item. The winner does not really pay $1,400-$2,400.. yes, the site gets that much from all the bidders, but the winner pays much lesser than that.. I think??

[Talon]

Penny auction sites really aren't scams. But, they are a form of gambling. The last bidder before time runs out wins. So, if you are the last bidder when time runs out you win. But, on most sites, there is no way of telling how much it cost the winner to bid, the winner could actually have paid more than the item is worth in order to win. There used to be a site called bidblink.com where if you lost the item, you could still purchase it at full retail minus the amount of cash you lost. I thought that model made sense, but unfortunately it mostly attracted risk-averse people and they shut down over a year ago because they weren't making money. Just be clear it is gambling, you can't know when people bidding against you will stop. I know retired people who do it for fun, kind of like recreation, but they have it under control and use a set budget that they NEVER exceed. Seems too risky to me! Definitely more risky than investing in Legos!

[pickleboy]

Cost the winner $1,440-$2,400? I'm trying to understand the site - but I believe all the "losing bidders", including "winning bidder" contributes to cost of the item. The winner does not really pay $1,400-$2,400.. yes, the site gets that much from all the bidders, but the winner pays much lesser than that.. I think??

What happens is you pay to bid. You pay a dollar or whatever the charge for a bid. Typically you pay in advance you get 10 bids of 9 bucks or 25 bids for 20 bucks or whatever...

So each person "bids"...as the time goes down...if someone places a bid in the last ten seconds of an auction is goes back up to 10 secs. You don't actually "bid" exactly...you basically agree to pay a cent or two more than the last person. HWne no one has any "bids" left or it hits zero and you were the last bidder, you get to pay the price that the auction is at. Basically, you only pay for your original bids and the 3 bucks or whatever the final "bid" was.

You might get a 100 item for 3 bucks but each one of those bids cost someone a buck so the site will get like 300 bucks for the the various bids and then the 3 dollars you buy the item for...

Make sense?

[cflannagan]

Cost the winner $1,440-$2,400? I'm trying to understand the site - but I believe all the "losing bidders", including "winning bidder" contributes to cost of the item. The winner does not really pay $1,400-$2,400.. yes, the site gets that much from all the bidders, but the winner pays much lesser than that.. I think??

What happens is you pay to bid. You pay a dollar or whatever the charge for a bid. Typically you pay in advance you get 10 bids of 9 bucks or 25 bids for 20 bucks or whatever...

So each person "bids"...as the time goes down...if someone places a bid in the last ten seconds of an auction is goes back up to 10 secs. You don't actually "bid" exactly...you basically agree to pay a cent or two more than the last person. HWne no one has any "bids" left or it hits zero and you were the last bidder, you get to pay the price that the auction is at. Basically, you only pay for your original bids and the 3 bucks or whatever the final "bid" was.

You might get a 100 item for 3 bucks but each one of those bids cost someone a buck so the site will get like 300 bucks for the the various bids and then the 3 dollars you buy the item for...

Make sense?

Yes, it makes perfect sense to me now. OrcKing's wording as follows: "So that supposed $24 iPad in reality cost you $1,440-$2,400! (Assuming you even 'won' it.)" doesn't seem right to me, and what you said is more in line with my own understanding of the site.

[comicblast]

Cost the winner $1,440-$2,400? I'm trying to understand the site - but I believe all the "losing bidders", including "winning bidder" contributes to cost of the item. The winner does not really pay $1,400-$2,400.. yes, the site gets that much from all the bidders, but the winner pays much lesser than that.. I think??

What happens is you pay to bid. You pay a dollar or whatever the charge for a bid. Typically you pay in advance you get 10 bids of 9 bucks or 25 bids for 20 bucks or whatever...

So each person "bids"...as the time goes down...if someone places a bid in the last ten seconds of an auction is goes back up to 10 secs. You don't actually "bid" exactly...you basically agree to pay a cent or two more than the last person. HWne no one has any "bids" left or it hits zero and you were the last bidder, you get to pay the price that the auction is at. Basically, you only pay for your original bids and the 3 bucks or whatever the final "bid" was.

You might get a 100 item for 3 bucks but each one of those bids cost someone a buck so the site will get like 300 bucks for the the various bids and then the 3 dollars you buy the item for...

Make sense?

Now hearing that, it scares me...If I had decided to try out a penny auction, I would have for sure been scammed my butt off. I would obviously report it here, but still it isn't like you can "return" your item that you bid on.

:(

[TheOrcKing]

What pickleboy replied with was more or less what I was just about to submit, but as usual to best laid plans something goes messed up and my computer went AWOL on me just as I was about to hit the submit button. Lousy 'brownouts' or whatever. Sheesh....

[TheOrcKing]

Does those so-called auctions expire at a fixed time, or is it something where a timer is reset anytime one bids onto that item, prolonging the auction end time?

The second one. Each item has a timer for something like 30 seconds to a minute. Everytime someone bids, it resets the timer.

Cost the winner $1,440-$2,400? I'm trying to understand the site - but I believe all the "losing bidders", including "winning bidder" contributes to cost of the item. The winner does not really pay $1,400-$2,400.. yes, the site gets that much from all the bidders, but the winner pays much lesser than that.. I think??

Yeah, my math was off. The site itself will get a total of $1,440 from all the bidders on a item, not from one person. So for that example $24 iPad i used, let's say a person bid 40 times. At 60 cents per bid, he/she will end up paying $24 whether they won or lost the auction. In the end, there would have been 2,400 bids altogether. That's a awful lot of bids AND bidders!

This was the best I could remember of what I had tried to submit the first time before pickelboy's response, but again f***ing PC.

Today just so happens to be yet another one of those days, and tomorrow looks to be the same.

......Crap.