Swoopo! Auction site or clever con?
Last month I discovered this website, Swoopo (www.swoopo.com). It bills itself as “entertainment shopping”, which I take to mean shopping that entertains you, not shopping for entertainment related purchases.
Swoopo is an auction site, of sorts, but is unique in a few ways most of which are detrimental to the actual shoppers.
* Unlike say, eBay, Swoopo has a very limited number of catagories, and a very limited variety and quantity of items for sale in any given catagory at one time. Users cannot post items for auction – all items are posted by Swoopo, all profits go to Swoopo.
* There is no way to search for an item at all. You must browse each category and every page in the category to find what you want. This is made somewhat less painful by the fact that the items are so limited.
* Bidding costs money. That’s right, it costs you money every time you place a bid. In fact, you can’t bid at all until you’ve purchased a “bidpack”, which is a certain number of bids, for a set price. You can buy as few as 30 bids ($22.50) or as many as 700 bids ($525.00) at a time. No matter how many bids you buy, there is no discount. Every bid costs 75 cents. Every bid you make on an item subtracts a bid from your pack.
* Auctions have an extremely long live time. Every auction has a clock attached to it, counting down the hours/min/sec until the auction ends. However, the clock is completely meaningless, because every single bid that is made increases the time remaining on the clock (as well as increasing the price, of course, and costing the bidder money). So an auction with literally 1 second remaining on the clock can suddenly shoot back up to 30 minutes or more in the flurry of bidding activity that usually comes with the end of an auction. The acutal “will-end” date of each auction appears to be 30 days from the day it started.
This is really a brilliant money-making strategy. Take an item I am watching, a 13.3″ Macbook. When I saw it, the bid was at $20 with about 1 hour remaining on the clock. 12 hours later, the same auction was still going on, with 45 minutes left, but the price had gone up to $45 dollars. Still a steal obviously.
This was a penny auction, which means every bid raised the price by one cent, and cost the bidder 75 cents. So in the 12 hours that elapsed, there were 2500 bids which netted Swoppo $1875. Even if the auction ends right now at that $45 price, they’ve made a tidy profit on the BIDS (over $500), and it shows no signs of ending as people continue to bid the clock back over the 30 minute mark every few seconds.
If you’re using Swoopo and bidding on multiple items, multiple times (almost a given since the timer refreshes with every bid) you could potentially spend *hundreds* of dollars bidding on items, and never actually win an auction.
What’s particularly egrarious about this system is that not only are you paying to bid, but you’re paying for the item after you win it! The money you spend to bid doesn’t count toward the actual price of the auction – in fact, your bids raise the price of the item, costing you twice if you happen win!
In a real auction, you don’t actually spend any money unless you…you know..WIN. The auctioneer doesn’t charge you to lose, that’s robbery.
The winning bidder is possibly still getting a good deal. Even if this Macbook ends up selling at $248 like the identical auction that ended just before it, and the winning bidder took 300 bids ($225) to win, they still got the laptop at a $800 savings. This assumes they weren’t bidding on another identical item, hoping to win one of them.
The ripoff comes if you’re one of the other dozen or more people who also bid dozens or hundreds of times, at a significant cost, and walked away empty-handed. It’s compounded by the fact that you almost have to use the auto-bidder, unless you can be glued to the website 24/7. The auto-bidder is specifically designed to compete against everyone else who is also using an auto-bidder. The auto-bidders basically duel, each one raising the bid by one cent (costing you 75 in the process) over the other until all the bidders except one run out of bids. Left to themselves, coupled with auctions that DO NOT END as long as they are being bid on, the auto-bidder system can easily use up a complete $525.00 bid pack in mere minutes (with internet latency, I’d guess about 90 seconds if there were 3 bidders involved), and do this to multiple bidders at once. Holy crap.
Bottom line: unless you have money to actually just throw away, avoid this site. The odds are that you will lose the vast majority of auctions you participate in while spending hundreds of dollars buying bids. If you DO have money to throw away, I recommend lighting it on fire and using it to burn bugs with – it’s bound to be more entertaining than this “entertainment shopping” site. Pretty sure the only people entertained here are the people making the profit from the gullible bidders.
Leave a Reply