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Bidrivals.com-An interesting way to shop.

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  • 29-08-2009 9:44pm
    #1
    Dman001
    Registered Users Posts: 5,534 ✭✭✭


    I came across Bidrivals.com today. Basically, BidRivals put items for sale on their site (no private sellers, all items are sold by BidRivals) and you bid on the item. But each bid costs 50 cent and every time you "bid" on the item the price goes up by 1 cent.

    Items are sold for what appears to be dirt cheap prices but when you take into account the price to bid on the item it isn't as cheap as it appears. You could pick up a bargain but alot of work would be involved. At first I thought it was a scam but BidRiavls make a fortune from it.

    For example:

    An iPod Touch sold for €19.02. But every time you place a bid, the price increases by 1 cent. So that is 1902 bids on the iPod. At 50 cent per bid, BR makes around €951 (give or take as when you sign up you get one bid free) on the iPod alone. The buyer then gets the iPod for €19.02 + the amount he spends on bids.

    I thought this was a very interesting way to shop and you do have an opportunity to get a bargain but it does take effort. Anyone have any experience with them?


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    #2
    jor el
    Closed Accounts Posts: 16,713 ✭✭✭✭jor el


    A copy of a Polish website, that has bankrupted an awful lot of people. This is the worst kind of website to buy from. Every bid you place costs you money, and after a point you'll keep going in order to get something out of it.

    Stay away from this, because if you get suckered in, you'll max out your credit card before you know it.

    www.fruli.pl is the original.


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    #3
    Dman001
    Registered Users Posts: 5,534 ✭✭✭Dman001


    Yes I can see how it could get addictive by keep bidding.
    As a business point of view, it is a great idea. But as a consumers point, it is risky.


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    #4
    jor el
    Closed Accounts Posts: 16,713 ✭✭✭✭jor el


    As a business, it's brilliant, and they stand to make a fortune. Some people will lose their shirt, and then some, on it though.


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    #5
    drunkmonkey
    Registered Users Posts: 28,120 ✭✭✭✭drunkmonkey


    I was just about to start a thread on the same site, seems like a great idea but have you any chance of winning an auction/bid, do you need to register your credit card before you can bid...


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    #6
    Dman001
    Registered Users Posts: 5,534 ✭✭✭Dman001


    It is near impossible to win an auction. When it comes to the last few seconds of the auction and someone bids, thee clock on the auction goes up to 15 seconds so it takes ages for the auction to end.


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    #7
    jor el
    Closed Accounts Posts: 16,713 ✭✭✭✭jor el


    And every bid you place will cost you 50c, which is 50c more that the site operators make. It will sucker you in, because you'll feel you have to go on once you get to a certain limit, otherwise you get absolutely nothing for all the 50c you have already paid.

    Someone will eventually win, it could be someone who is placing their first bid, or someone who's just spent €500, and the item might not even be worth that much.

    You're a fool if you go anywhere near this, but in the current climate of desperate buyers, especially as we get closer to Christmas, this is going to flourish.


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    #8
    peckerhead
    Registered Users Posts: 3,379 ✭✭✭peckerhead


    Has anyone tried this one?

    Save your money, mate, it looks well iffy...


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    #9
    rubadub
    Registered Users Posts: 32,379 ✭✭✭✭rubadub


    Have to say I am well impressed with this scam. They are clever snakes and it really does prey on the ignorant who would not really think it through, or who just cannot get their head around the actual maths and probability of it all.

    They have closed auctions, I would like to see the real price people paid on all the auctions, i.e. how many bids the "winner" had to put in.


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    #10
    RasTa
    Closed Accounts Posts: 15,116 ✭✭✭✭RasTa


    There is another one @ www.swoopo.co.uk and is just pure gambling, not so sure about scam but people do get caught up in it and spend thousands. Personally, I wish I had come up with the idea!

    I was talking with someone who used to do it when it first opened and he said it was decent, you would save about 200-300 on a TV, €50-60 off a PS2 etc but now it's impossible to win anything with so many people on.


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    #11
    rubadub
    Registered Users Posts: 32,379 ✭✭✭✭rubadub


    More info on it here, makes for a good read the way they put it. Also has some other good links in the page, like brinksmanship and sunk costs
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidding_fee_scheme


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    #12
    colmmcgettrick
    Registered Users Posts: 13 ✭colmmcgettrick


    Came accross the paddygold site yesterday and via http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=121977&highlight=paddygold found some details about the company involved and I joined in in part for fun/greed in part because it looks like a nice model of raising money for charity using items donated.

    After studying and recording (screen captures and jing) of the bidding behaviour of many of the auctions which ranged from 400 - 800 seperate single bids I noticed that many of the winners were only responsible for the last and final winning bid.

    Statistically it is difficult to accept that such luck could exist for one user, but for more than 4 winning bidders on one day the statistics are almost unbelieveable. It would make more sense if these lucky winning users were symtoms of a script on the server which prevented items being sold too cheapily so that the items could return to the web site owners to auctioned again. Thus meaning that all none server generate bids are pure profit for the web site.

    How could this honestily work, where is the profit, why might it not be a scam? why might it be a scam? how could the statistics indicate this ? Is my interpretation of the statistics correct, should I publish them elsewhere ?

    1/
    Each bid increase of 5 cents costs the bidder 50 cents, so that for ever 5 cents of the final purchase price the web site obtains 50 cents from the cost of the bids. In percentaegs that is 90.9% from bids purchases, with the remainder + p&p from the final winner.

    2a/ This could be a win win situation i.e. if a phone worth 199 euros is sold for 30.25 euros. this means the income generated from the bids is 302.50 euros which leaves a profit for the web site while the winning bidder pays the 30.25 euros plus the cost of the bids they placed. If there were many bidders the cost of the bids is shared by those involved in the bidding.

    2b/
    If god forbid/hypotetically the server should decide to check ever winning bid and if the purchase price was less than a certain amount then to create and add a bid of its own, what would this mean? It would mean that all the money generated by others bidders would be pure profit for the web site, and the item for auction could be auctioned again at a later stage, but surely such would be wrong and would not happen?

    3/ On this premise of 2a I joined the site, and purchased two lots of bid one 10 bid for 5 euros and one lot of 55 bids for 25 euros.

    Bidding behaviour
    I watched about 10 auctions over the course of 4-5 hours and each started with a group of users each out bidding the other and slowly the group got smaller but the repeatition continued until at the very end of an auction an new user who had not bid before appeared and placed the winning bid.

    I saved a screen capture of each winning bid and the bid history. I could understand this happening once or twice but each time, and each time the user had a different user name. If I was that user and I had figured out how to jump into an auction and place the final winning bid, I would surely be doing it again in another auction. But each time the final single winning username is different, is this a little strange?

    My reaction to this bidding behaviour

    After seeing this, my next step was to watch the bidding at an auction, once the price reached a few euros, then to only bid after a bidder who had not bid before joined the auction.

    Once I outbid this new username the bidding behaviour changed totally into a two horse race, after 7 counter bids I watched this new user be announced as the winner or that item. a 2000 euro camera which sold for 53 euros.

    By now I had convinced myself that I had an understanding of the system I was looking at, but I still had another 40 bids ( Cost of 20 euros) to get rid of in my account.

    I watched another cheaper camera go to auction and be sold in a simular fashion, except this time I did not challenge the final new user bid and the newuser won the auction after only placing one bid, very very lucky especially after the combined number of bids from other users numbered 451 bids.

    To get rid of my remaining 33 bids and also to stop wasting time looking at this web site I picked a cheaper item to bid on, a surround sound system, as I thought they might let me be a winning bid on this item. After about 10 minutes of the bid rotating between a smaller and smaller group of bidders then a new user popped up into the auction, and I out bid them, immediatily again it was straight into a two horse race. 33 straight successive bids later and this user had access to more bid than I. Lucky them.


    How I recorded the above bidding behavour on Dec 5th 2009 from www.paddygold.com

    Join the web site, (now I am uncomfortable that they may have a record of my CC details). They provide 5 free bids to each new user. Using the bid butler place one bid on 3 different items, allow each auction to run its course then I returned to the bid butler, I observed that each winner had only placed one of the previous 15 bids. Now download jing which provides a super simple way to do screen video captures. Spend 1 minute learning how to use it. Then use the bid butler to place 1 bid on an item and set jing to record the auction. it does only do 5 minutes at a time so you may have to record the auction in steps.

    It would make sense for this type of web site to hide the fact that a new user jumps into an auction after so many bids and be able to place the final one winning bid. It is a little like telling people about santa clause for them not to try and hide this detail better. I expect that they will in the future, but I have my recordings of the bidding behaviour from today, which indicates to me that I would not want to return to this web site.

    At present it is not possible prove for certain that any of the winning bidders today are anything to do with this web site, but after recording the bidding behaviour in varying level of detail of 10 different auctions some of which included more than 800 different bids is is statistically surprising for one winning bidder to have only had to place one bid, the final bid to win an item. For it to happen once indicated a very lucky bidder, but after about 4 times I think it looks strange. More than 4 times on one day , you can draw your own conclusions.


    There is how ever one item I can safely state is not correct and which does not require any statistics,
    when it states on the home page that
    4. Once timer has reached 00:00:00 - you won!

    On serveral ocasions my bid reached the 00:00:00 only for the site to move to the word Processing and for my 2 horse race to continue. I have the screen captures of this web site to confirm this.

    Finally
    Yes I realise that a screen capture could be photoshopped to state anything, but I have not edited any of my records in any way to mislead anyone as to the bidding behaviour on www.paddygold.com

    What you should do next ?
    Well I wasted 25 euros on this site today, I thought I should gather some evidence to indicate how this site probable appears to be operating. I realise that at any moment in time by editing a few scripts on theirserver the behaviour of this site could change in the future, but it will always be difficult to accept that the site is never using option 2b mentioned above.

    It would take very little for this web site to make it impossible to duduce any unusual bidding behavour in the future, but today was not the time. It may well be a case that many others have won items from this web site in the past and it makes sense once the item is sold for a least 9-10% of its trade value allowing the other 90-91 % to be obtained via the price of the bids. But it is so easy for any site to twist all the options in its own favour, and only to allow people to place a winning bid for its PR value. So it can use the winner to promote the web site.

    I will upload the screen captures of todays auctions at www.paddygold.com when I get a chance, on a sdifferent machine at present.
    (I should remind you that the images are of full web page width about 1072 pixels)



    Regards


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