The web auction site Beezid

[scaeagles]

Has anyone been brave enough to try this?

I happened across this the other day and it looks exceptionally cool, yet exceptionally scary. I have no doubt the people who came up with this are making oodles and oodles of money.

Most easily explained with an example....while they have a few different types of auctions, this type seems the most common -

I purchase the right to bid on their website. Bids cost between 60 and 90 cents, depending on how many I purchase.

Every time an item on the site is bid on, the price goes up 1 cent. As long as people keep bidding on an item, the auction on the item will continue. I was observing an auction of a $600 Am Ex gift card. It was currently 40.00. This means that there had been 4000 bids at an average of 75 cents/bid, or $3000 in the bid fees that the company brought in. This auction was over once no one had bid for 15 seconds.

They have different levels of items, allowing users to only win a certain number of items in a certain perion of time in that level of auction. They have certain items you can bid on for free until you've won your first auction.

My first reaction was that this is simply gambling. But i have to admit it is a very, very cool concept, and it seems like someone is making a whole hell of a lot of money on it.

Anyway....anyone tried it?

[Alex]

I can't imagine having enough unused time in my life to make it worthwhile to sit there watching an auction until it dies just to gamble and hope my lottery ticket of a bid is the winning one. Especially since, watching the behavior for a few minutes it looks like everybody does the same thing they sit and wait for the timer to hit one second hoping someone else will bid then a half dozen people all bid (based on the price jump of multiple cents) and only one of them even gets the chance that their bid could win.

It seems to me you're hoping to get lucky and a momentary big of net lag causes those last second bids to come in late.

But I suppose if you have the time and absolutely nothing else to do with it...

[flippyshark]

There are several similar sites around these days. I once spent an hour or two reading about them, and watching a couple of auctions (a MacBook Pro and a Sony HDTV) to see where they would stop. I noticed that the final stages of these auctions can actually go on for hours, with those final few seconds being reset again and again as the auction sites rake in those 60 cent bids over and over. You can end up babysitting such an "auction" for a long tedious time, OR sites sell auto-bid services so that you can lose money while you step away from your computer.

If you participate, it's very unlikely you will wind up as the one who gets a forty dollar iPad, but you might be the unlucky sap who spent fifty dollars trying. Most of these sites now let you apply those hapless dollars toward a full retail price purchase of the item you were after. Otherwise, thanks for playing and thanks for the cash, sucker!

Yeah, kind of like gambling, or playing a giant electronic claw game, but at heart, it's a really tedious and (for most participants) pointless way of shopping. That carrot of an unbelievably cheap goodie is admittedly a powerful one, though.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Yuck. The only thing worse than gambling is gambling disguised as shopping.

Just reading how this stuff works makes me feel sorry for gambling addicts and avowed bargain hunters.

[Moonliner]

Huh.

It only takes one bid to continue an auction but what's the odds the site accepts all the last second clicks. Implying that Scaeagels profit estimate per item is low, perhaps by several times.

[Alex]

No, I think it's approximately right. If you watch the price jump when a timer is near zero it can go up by several cents (I saw it once jump by 9) so it seems to becrediting all of them. So I don't think it is the case you could have 9 people click, 9 people get charged, but the price only goes up one cent.

Could be wrong though. I only watched for about four minutes.

[Kevy Baby]

I thought we had a discussion a few months ago about a similar sight, but I cannot seem to locate it.

[scaeagles]

Well, after a bit of research it certainly seems as if I will never go near anything like this. Holy freakin' cow. I'd rather buy a 252 million dollar powerball ticket. At least then I have no expectation of any return.

[flippyshark]

Well, after a bit of research it certainly seems as if I will never go near anything like this. Holy freakin' cow. I'd rather buy a 252 million dollar powerball ticket. At least then I have no expectation of any return.

A wise decision. In unrelated news, who is that adorable creature in your avatar? I don't recognize it, but there are so many pop culture things I remain innocent of these days.

[bewitched]

In unrelated news, who is that adorable creature in your avatar?

It's Mort (http://www.nick.com/shows/penguins-of-madagascar/characters/mort.html) from Penguins of Madagascar.