It’s a waste of your money.

I bought 40 bids (about $25 bucks worth) and did some research on some items. I realized most, if not all the items that sold for way under price are sold between 11pm PDT and 4am PDT. I added about 5 items to my watchlist that all ended between those times (mostly PS3’s, video games and a cell phone).

I was keeping actively bidding on the first PS3 with about 10 other people. It was up to about $40 or $50 and I had only spent a couple of bids at this point, just watching the flow of the auction, but I was ready to stick it out to the end.

Anyway, the auction would hit near 1 or 2 seconds and you’d see a bunch of bids go in at the last second, this happened to all items on auction so it seemed pretty normal.

At 12 seconds left (during one of the countdowns) the auction just ended and closed. It went from 12 seconds to closed with NO explanation as to why. The person who had recently bid won the PS3 at around $60 or so at this point. I was ready to continue bidding and 12 seconds is a lot of time left on an item.

I have no idea why it went straight from 12 seconds to closed/ended. The deadline for the auction (the absolute end date, which each auction item has) was still 2 days away.

I sent a message to Swoopo support using their own support section/form with the item number and asked why it went from 12 seconds to ended with no explanation. They have yet to respond back to me and it’s been 2 days.

My conclusion, either someone is watching these bids and closing them early for whatever reason or their system is seriously screwed up. In either case, I wasted $25 bucks so you don’t have to.

DO NOT USE SWOOPO.

Being that the Business itself is making money off the bids, I would feel there would be less likelihood for any internal monitoring system from preventing a self-outbidding scheme from taking place.

Lets look at it this way.

Swoopo puts up a hot item… lets say a 50″ Plasma TV. Bidding opens up at $1.00 with a half hour bidding time.

It gets a few bids and by the time it reaches a 5-Minute marker it is still priced rather low at lets say $27.00.

Now is where the “Fun” begins. With time breaking 5-Minute marker, the bidders watching the auctions are getting more tempted to closely watch the item to try to “pick” their moment, hoping no one else is going to bid.

By the time it breaks 1 Minute remainder time on auction, the 50″ Plasma is up to $50.00. If it was a $0.01 auction item, each bid was increasing the auction price by $0.01 / increasing seconds on item by 1-4 seconds (from what I witness watching an auction today). Each bid transaction comes at a cost of $0.60. For the item to have reached a price of $50.00, there would have been4,900 bids @ $0.60 a bid for a total item sale value of $2,940.00 for that 50″ Plasma. ($49.00 / $0.01 x $0.60 = $2,940.00) I doubt they paid retail value for that 50″ Plasma, so the percentage of Markup on the item sold even at $50.00 would be well over 100%.

That’s just the icing on the cake.

Now lets say Joe Blow was banking on getting himself a cheap Plasma and this looked like too sweet a deal to pass up. Joes been bidding since the minute marker and made a grand total of 30 bids (30 bids @ $0.60 = $18.00). Lets be honest, $18.00 isn’t that much money really, but if Joe doesn’t win the bid, he spent $18.00 on absolutely nothing. Compound that by the thousands and you really got a huge rip off scheme going.

And I am hardly finished. What Joe Blow doesn’t realize, along with the hundreds of other participating bidders, is that Swoopo stacked the decks! They’ve got auto-auction bidders who will continually outbid you on every item till the finally tick of the clock.

As I said earlier, who is monitoring these auctions to ensure that this is not happening and how is someone to know they auctions are legit? Who is to say that Swoopo hasn’t set into place an auto-bidding program behind their website for every available auction, or that they aren’t hiring people on the side to bid on the items themselves, and paying them a percentage of the bottom line $$$ markups they are making off of items. Who is tracking the items sold to ensure there are actually items being delivered to “customers” as you might think of them.

I highly doubt there is any monitoring of a site in this nature, and I am willing to bet that there is a indecipherable user agreement the length of a full series of encyclopedias covering Swoopo’s A$$ for the legality of the business they are conducting.

If that penny auction 50″ Plasma went up to $200.00 on the final sale, Swoopo brought in an astronomical $11,940.00 for a set that would have retailed $1000.00 – $2000.00 in stores today.

If Swoopo is engaging in self bidding on auctions, and they do not actually let a real bidder/customer win an auction, that $11,940.00 would be ALL PROFIT, since in fact no item was sold or delivered to a “customer”/bidder. I don’t care how they may be doing it, but I would be very skeptical on the ethics of this business and would lean towards the angle that this may in fact be the very thing they are doing.

Someone ought to have the business investigated for fraud.

Good deal or not for an individual purchase, this is capitalistic mentality at it’s dirtiest.

Hey… SWOOPO… CUT ME IN!!! I’ll bid on your auctions for you all day for a measly 1% of your profits from the auctions I partake in, and laugh my A$$ off all the way to the bank just like you are doing.

you pay $1.00 but could win million .

i buy alot things on swoopo didnt make me rich yet but gave me new life .
cause you still can resell what you buy .