Bid Butlers are the automated bidding tool built into Swoopo to help you automatically place bids. At first thought you would think they are there to help automate the bidding process, but as with everything in Swoopo they are really there to help make the game more complicated and interesting.
Let’s cover the fundamentals of the Bid Butler first. You pick a staring price an ending price and the total number of bids you are willing to use.
Let’s say we are buying item X. It is currently selling at $8. We set our Bid Butler to start bidding at $10 all the way to $20 and we are willing to use 5 bids. Bid Butlers are the most complicated part of Swoopo and you must understand their pros and cons in order to win at Swoopo.
The Bid Butler will automatically place a bid for you when the clock is between 10 and 1 second. This is very important to know as we will use this fact later in single bidding to work against the person using the Bid Butler.
The last fundamental fact to understand is what happens when two people both use a Bid Butler with the same price range.
This is the worst thing that can happen in Swoopo land and should be avoided at all cost. This will burn through bids faster than an Indy speed car.
Sticking with our example from above if two people both set Bid Butlers to go from $10 – $20 with 10 bids each this is what would happen as soon as the $10 threshold was broken. Both Bid Butlers would place all bids. Both players would have used all ten bids at the exact same time. You would go from 5 seconds left and then all of a sudden the price would jump to $13 all bids would be used. The time would also jump. The first bid would set the time remaining to 15 seconds and then the remaining 19 bids would increment the time by 20 seconds 19 times adding a total of 380 seconds.
A person using single bidding would just sit back and watch as two opponents burned through 20 bids each.
I think the best way to understand the Bid Butler is to understand the limitations and ways you will lose with a Bid Butler when you thought you would win. We have several posts under advanced strategies that cover in-depth ways you can face a challenge with the Bid Butler.
Sites like Swoopo are more for fun than for people actually looking for a bargain. I suggest you look around at the other auction sites similar to Swoopo. Hasteno.com is a new one that I’ve been playing on and I’ve actually won a couple things. Playstation 3 games going for $.08 (2 bids!) and a Nintendo Wii going for $2.16 is ridiculous. Before you completely discount the idea, you should check them out.