Madbid.ie

mandz · 04-08-2011 12:32pm #1

Heard a radio advert for this site last night and just had a quick look now. Has anyone joined and used this auction site? I'm wondering is it too good to be true

http://ie.madbid.com/live/

gufnork · 04-08-2011 12:37pm

nope, but i have seen some tv adverts for it too recently. I'm gonna sign my wife up when i get some spare cash, i know she's dying to try it. You can try it for free(couple of goes only though i believe). My theory is, it's a tenner(or there-abouts) for about 80 credits(i think), so what have you got to lose really?

jeeeez, that was a lot of brackets...:eek:

seamus · 04-08-2011 12:37pm

It's important to understand how it works.

You have to buy credits in order to bid. Every bid costs at least one credit.

When an item goes up for auction, someone bids on it. If no-one bids within 30 seconds, they get to buy the item at the current price.

If someone else bids, the price goes up by 1c, and the timer resets.

You see the obvious problem here? You bid, it costs you 10c. Then someone else bids and your 10c is gone. And so on.

In reality, by the time you come to "win" something, you probably won't get a huge amount off it, and you'll have already spent a decent amount of money bidding.

So yes, it is too good to be true.

Ardennes1944 · 04-08-2011 12:38pm

good few comments explaining the site here orums.hexus.net/shopping-retail-therapy/151448-madbid-com-scam.html

gufnork · 04-08-2011 12:39pm

damn it!!

Black_Knight · 04-08-2011 12:48pm

Yeah, dont go there. Waste of time and money.

Feidhlim · 04-08-2011 12:50pm

Black_Knight wrote: »

Yeah, dont go there. Waste of time and money.

+1

dodzy · 04-08-2011 1:08pm

seamus wrote: »

It's important to understand how it works.

You have to buy credits in order to bid. Every bid costs at least one credit.

When an item goes up for auction, someone bids on it. If no-one bids within 30 seconds, they get to buy the item at the current price.

If someone else bids, the price goes up by 1c, and the timer resets.

You see the obvious problem here? You bid, it costs you 10c. Then someone else bids and your 10c is gone. And so on.

In reality, by the time you come to "win" something, you probably won't get a huge amount off it, and you'll have already spent a decent amount of money bidding.

So yes, it is too good to be true.

A very simple concise explanation. Steer well clear.

sweetie · 04-08-2011 1:13pm

gufnork wrote: »

nope, but i have seen some tv adverts for it too recently. I'm gonna sign my wife up when i get some spare cash, i know she's dying to try it. You can try it for free(couple of goes only though i believe). My theory is, it's a tenner(or there-abouts) for about 80 credits(i think), so what have you got to lose really?

jeeeez, that was a lot of brackets...:eek:

a tenner :P

seamus · 04-08-2011 1:19pm

Just to give a practical example, the first item at present is a €10,000 voucher towards a car.

The current price stands at €422.73. Sounds awesome if you can get it.

This means that there have been 42,273 bids on this item.

Each bid in this case costs you six credits a minimum of 60c.

Which means that madbid.com have already made €25,363.80 on this item, through people bidding for it.

That's how it works for madbid.com. They cream off it. For the person who actually wins in the end, they're not going to bid 42,000 times. They will come out of it with a nice little break. But that's all down to pure luck. If there are 2,000 bidding on it, only one guy gets to buy the voucher for cheap, and 1,999 other people have already lost an average of €12 by bidding on the item.

As described in a link above, it's a lottery. A very expensive lottery with very poor prizes.

mickdw · 04-08-2011 1:35pm

Had never looked at that site before.
It is a fantastic format for the site owners to be fair with massive profits built in. Wouldnt touch it though as it is a big gable and would eat up cash, costing 50c just to bump the price by a penny each time on many items.

The Garden Shop · 04-08-2011 1:42pm

scamolla......avoid.....Only two winners(owners & possibly bid winner) and lots & lots of losers

seamus · 04-08-2011 1:50pm

I actually don't think it's fair to call it a scam.

If you look at the site, the "How does it work" link explains how it works, truthfully. What they do is play down the cost of the credits and their advertising doesn't make any reference to actual cost. While John Doe may have bought an iPhone for €50, it doesn't tell you how many credits he spent before he won any item. He could have spent €500 in credit for all we know, making the iPhone much less of a bargain.

What they're really doing is making it appear as though they're offering an ebay-style site with low prices, rather than a form of gambling site.

The information I got in the above posts is not from any other sites, but from simply reading the madbid.com site and putting the pieces together. So I don't think the owners are blatantly lying or otherwise scamming people out of money. They fall into a grey area because it's not a lottery, so they don't have to tell anyone any odds nor be completely upfront to avoid people misunderstanding.

IMO, it's a limited-life site, a bit like a pyramid scheme. The vast bulk of cash will be from first-time users coming in, buying €10 worth of credit, losing it and then never returning.

youcancallmeal · 04-08-2011 1:56pm

seamus wrote: »

Just to give a practical example, the first item at present is a €10,000 voucher towards a car.

The current price stands at €422.73. Sounds awesome if you can get it.

This means that there have been 42,273 bids on this item.

Each bid in this case costs you six credits a minimum of 60c.

Which means that madbid.com have already made €25,363.80 on this item, through people bidding for it.

That's how it works for madbid.com. They cream off it. For the person who actually wins in the end, they're not going to bid 42,000 times. They will come out of it with a nice little break. But that's all down to pure luck. If there are 2,000 bidding on it, only one guy gets to buy the voucher for cheap, and 1,999 other people have already lost an average of €12 by bidding on the item.

As described in a link above, it's a lottery. A very expensive lottery with very poor prizes.

Northern Monkey · 04-08-2011 2:21pm

I haven't used madbid, but used to use another site called bidrivals quite a lot and did fairly well out of it.

For a total outlay of about £400 I won the following:

roughly £1,000 in amazon vouchers
Oakley Splice skiing goggles
Leatherman multi tool
Years subscription to GQ magazine
Laptop case
£100 in Asos vouchers
solar phone charger (pile of crap)
A few other bits and pieces which escape me at the minute.

I don't really bother with it anymore as it was quite time consuming and they changed the layout to a format which I didn't like, but a lot of the users are creatures of habit, so if you put in the time and analyse who is bidding and how many bids on average they are placing you can do quite well out of the lower value items as there are less people bidding on them.

One thing to note is that although the site is madbid.ie you are actually biding on the same item as the users on madbid.com/.co.uk/etc.

Madbid.ie

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