Ask HN: What od you think of Pay to Bid Auction Sites such as Swoopo.com

1 point·mcalvey2··4 comments

Do you think the pay to bid sites like Swoopo are a growth market for a new company? Do you think they are scams? What are your overall thoughts?

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Scam? Not exactly, but shady. Growth, I guess. There are ads on TV for another site just like them.

Simple concept though, sell bids. When you have reached your profit line, have the robot on your server (that spends no money) stop bidding on an item and let someone win. Then you just find a low price on amazon.com and dropship it to the winner.

Yea, scam. Do the math and you realize its a scam. Theres been posts on this over a year ago. Think about it. At 1 cent increments if bidding itself costs 1 cent. By the time the price reaches 100 bucks you already made 100 dollars in bids along. But bidding usually costs 5 cents per 1 cent bid so you already made 500 dollars on a 100 dollar auction + 100 dollars for sale.

From what I've heard/read about them, they take a lot of manual maintenance and oversite to make sure things run smoothly.

As far as scam, they aren't really tricking people, it's just that people are dumb and don't spend enough time to realize they could spend a shit ton of money on something if they don't pay attention.

Thieves, milking the naive for all they're worth as fast as they can, before they're inevitably outlawed.

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