The Money Mustache Community
General Discussion => Welcome and General Discussion => Topic started by: slimwhoisdirtay on October 27, 2014, 07:38:00 AM
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Penny auctions have been a fairly popular online auction format over the past few years. The sites look spammy and often times the deals seem too good to be true.
Examples, http://www.beezid.com/ https://www.quibids.com
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Bought a bunch of stuff on ebay for $0.01 in order to get my feedback score up for my resellers business (bought coupons, recipes, ebooks, etc. that I never intended on actually using.). That was a while ago though and they now crack down on stuff like that. They call in "feedback manipulation" now. Hehe.
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The deals look too good to be true because they are not the actual price paid to the seller. You pay per bid to increase the price.
If I sold a car by auction and each person that wanted to increase the price by $1 had to give me $100 to purchase that bid, I'd probably end up saying I sold the car for $100 or $150, when I brought in $10,000 or $15,000.
Looks like a Quibids "penny" costs $0.60, and I believe a bid on Beezid costs $1.
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They are (currently) legal, but they shouldn't be. They are a mix between an outright scam and gambling. When I type in "quibids" the very first autocomplete search string is "quibids scam quibids complaints". If you like gambling then I guess you will like those sites, but they are not real purchasing methods.
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If it is something you plan to buy anyways, you can put a couple bids on the item, if you don't win, you have the option to buy at full price, minus the value you spent on bidding so far.
So if you plan to buy something they offer, at full price anyway, it can be worth giving it a shot. You could bid until you get spend the value of the item in bids, then just pay the small difference to purchase the item that you were willing to pay full price for. That said, their full price is most likely MSRP and you can find it at a cheaper price, which means it is most likely not a good deal.
It is a gamble if you plan to keep trying to win different auctions for the same item until you win, and the odds are that you will pay more, or end up not getting the item at all, but paying for the bids.
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i was goofing off on quibids and got a mac book pro for 14.97. I have no clue at all how that happened. it was literally the first day. since then I've been terrified to buy anything else. I sold the computer because apple products confuse me
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SCAM SCAM SCAM DON'T DO IT
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Definitely 90% scam, 10% gambling. Don't do it.
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Penny auctions are a form of lottery, their business model actually makes perfect sense. You buy bids for a chance to win a prize. If you use one of the popular sites I highly doubt you'll be scammed, but just remember that it is a lottery and not an actual shopping site.