Swoopo Auctions

[Murgos]

Holy crap what a scam.  I'm not going to link it, you can google it.

It's brilliant.  They have 'penny auctions' where the price of whatever you are buying only increments per bid and each bid is 1 cent.  However, the brilliant part is that each bid costs you 75 cents.  So, to sell an item at $10.00 (you pay shipping by the way) required $750.00 worth of bids!  (1000 bids at $0.75 per bid)

There is a recent Macbook that sold on there for the low price of $255.29, which is a great price for a Macbook, assuming you only made a couple of bids.  However, Swoopo made $19,146.75 selling that Macbook!  Subtract out their costs and they probably cleared $16,000 easily.

 

[Trippy]

Each bid increments the price $0.15. The cent increment thing is just a gimmick.

Edit: The means the MacBook receieved 1502 bids or the site got $1125.50.

[Murgos]

Each bid increments the price $0.15.

Not always: http://www.swoopo.com/auction/apple-macbook-mb466ll-a-13-3-inch-laptop/151675.html

[Trippy]

Not always: http://www.swoopo.com/auction/apple-macbook-mb466ll-a-13-3-inch-laptop/151675.html

Oh okay, interesting.

[Trippy]

It's kind of amusing watching the "snipers" go at it.

[Trippy]

Cash auctions are

Gotta love gambling on the Internet.

[Trippy]

If I wasn't so lazy I'd write a script and go through all their finished auctions and calculate how much money they've made so far, presuming their "retail" prices are legit.

[Murgos]

My guess is that they conduct the auction and then order the pieces from a retailer.  I mean, why not?  They might occasionally lose money but I bet it's rare.

This is incredibly meta: http://www.swoopo.com/auction/300-bids-voucher/153380.html

[Trippy]

Yes they don't stock anything as they have a disclaimer that they are allowed to ship an "equivalent" item if the actual item is "unavailable".

Also that BidButler is truly evil (I mean even more evil than the concept itself is):

What about when two or more BidButlers are set to bid in the same price range?

If there are two or more BidButlers bidding against each other, all the consecutive BidButler bids are placed immediately, and the price and countdown increase with each BidButler bid placed.

(We do this so that bidders can easily see the auctions that will end soon unless another bid is placed – it’s those where the countdown is down to less than ten seconds).
In the example below, we have two BidButlers that were set to place bids at price ranges that overlapped.  11 BidButler bids are placed immediately one after the other . You can see that we’ve added 11 x 15c (US$1.65). As the timer was at 5 seconds when these bids were triggered, the first BidButler bid only added 15 seconds, but the other ten add 20 seconds each, so we add (15 + 10 x 20 = 215) seconds , or 3 minutes 35 seconds to the counter to bring the timer up to 3 minutes 40 seconds. (This is why you sometimes see the time on Swoopo auctions jump up).

[Murgos]

Yeah, the Bidbutler is like, great.  I think it actually has the opposite effect of what the user intends.  Any auction with two or more bidders involved where one is a bidbutler bot is going to be automatically extended out unless every other bidder walks away.  Under optimal circumstances the bot could win the auction for you with minimal effort, in reality though it will just up the cost and length of the auction.

Edit: If I were going to bid on any of these I think the first thing I would do is write a script to track what time of day auctions usually end at (the time of lowest activity).  Then another script to bid in the correct time range and only on non-recent bid-butler auctions.  To work it you would want to get stacks of bid vouchers first.  The idea being to give the human bidder(s) on the other end at 3 am the impression that you are just going to dump monies into the auction and that the 75 cents a bid thing has you fooled so that they just walk off.  You want them thinking, geez, "that idiot just spent 700 bucks in bids."  So, If you can get your cost per bid down to 5 or 10 cents you can leverage that.

Of course, if I were them, I would insta-ban anyone with that behavior profile

[bhodi]

This entire idea is brilliant and my hat is off to the makers of that website. They've got a real scam going on there.

Also I'm kind of addicted to watching stupid people get parted of their money in real time.

[Oban]

Also I'm kind of addicted to watching stupid people get parted of their money in real time.

I don't know, CNBC is getting kind of old.

[Salamok]

My guess is that they conduct the auction and then order the pieces from a retailer.  I mean, why not?  They might occasionally lose money but I bet it's rare.

This is incredibly meta: http://www.swoopo.com/auction/300-bids-voucher/153380.html

I would be willing to bet money that there is a bid butler for the house that bids up until costs are covered (or flat out wins when they aren't).

[Righ]

I'm willing to bet 'the house' will ban you if you start winning too many auctions.

[Murgos]

I would be willing to bet money that there is a bid butler for the house that bids up until costs are covered (or flat out wins when they aren't).

Yeah, that would be my guess.  Factor in the cost of 'cheap' bids from people who buy blocks of bids, probably just by tracking real value spent, and then use a couple of dozen 'names' of bidders to keep the thing going until you have a reasonable mark-up.  Chances are that with people they way they are you wouldn't really have to do that all that often.

There is, of course, no reason to actually sell anything.  You could always have your bot 'win' the auction.  But, really, why risk it?  It looks like they are making plenty-o-cash to afford to actually send people their 'winnings'.

[Salamok]

I'm willing to bet 'the house' will ban you if you start winning too many auctions.

I doubt they care as long as a profit is made and an in house bidding script can ensure that.  They don't have any inventory, they are in the business of selling lottery tickets to win items.  I seriously doubt this is regulated as a lottery so if they win the bid they make even more money on it (who knows maybe no one ever wins).  The people who were outbid will just roll to the next auction with a stronger conviction to pump the system even more at $0.75 a whack.  

This reeks of "it's not a pyramid it's a matrix!" v2.0 (or would that be v3.0).

[apocrypha]

I would be willing to bet money that there is a bid butler for the house that bids up until costs are covered (or flat out wins when they aren't).

Yeah this has been discussed in the UK news recently because they're claiming it's not gambling and therefore they're exempt from the gambling laws, and that accusation was made several times. They denied it but there's no way to prove or disprove it atm.

Total scam IMO. Shows you can never underestimate the stupidity of people though.

[Trippy]

In the US it's definitely illegal (it's considered a for-profit lottery) and similiar companies in the US (BestOfferAuction, BelieveItOrNotAuctions) have been shut down.

[Salamok]

In the US it's definitely illegal (it's considered a for-profit lottery) and similiar companies in the US (BestOfferAuction, BelieveItOrNotAuctions) have been shut down.

/cough whois

not a problem

[Trippy]

I didn't say it was a problem for Swoopo.

[HaemishM]

I signed up on this site when I first saw an ad, thinking I would get a cheap bid on some Wii games. Then I saw the actual process for bidding, Googled a little and ran right the fuck away. Talk about stealing money from retarded children.