A lot of people have asked if Swoopo is a scam. The short answer to the question is no. People really do get some awesome stuff at amazing prices. I am one of them. I got my flip camera off of swoopo. I saved a few dollars, but I’ve also lost money on auctions where I didn’t win. The posts you read about online are from people that didn’t read the rules, got confused and think the world in general is out to screw them over.
Let’s be clear, the system is an ingenious market. It creates situations where one person gets an amazing deal funded by everyone else. There is a good reason they call it an entertainment auction. It gives me the same feeling as playing online poker. A certain rush of adrenaline comes over you as you get close to either winning or losing. The system is setup so that Swoopo almost always wins. The main difference is that you have to pay for bids.
The system gets really crazy during the penny auctions. If you think that each bid costs .60 and the price of the item moves up .01 with each bid you see how Swoopo makes a ton while someone gets a great deal on a new T.V. If you see a TV sell for $100 that normall sells for $1,000 on a penny auction remember that Swoopo got .60 * 10,000 or $6,000. Not a bad deal for Swoopo. Oh yeah, don’t forget that you still have to pay $100 for the item.
In some aspects it is kind of like gambling. You can always control the outcome by bidding again and again, but somehow it just doesn’t work out that way.
Bottom line. Swoopo is not a scam, people really win stuff. It pays to be patient and fully understand your bidding strategy before you start.
I would like your feedback on another site I’ve been using, bidfire.com. It has been relatively easy to win on the site and I’m wondering what makes it so different from swoopo and the difficulty I’ve had trying to win there
Helpful post on Swoopo. Definitely useful. There’s actually a good review website I found recently, where you can see the typical savings that people can expect. It’s all broken down by category (ie. Electronics, Accessories, whatever) and you can take a look at how Swoopo ranks as well as how other penny auction sites rank. Here’s the link to the site’s reviews for Swoopo.
Try to register a username on Swoopo that contains any uppercase characters and your registered username will be all lowercase characters. Be suspicious of bidders who have usernames containing uppercase characters because they did not go through the normal registration process. Try it yourself, your username will be all lowercase. Be suspicious.
Swoopo is not a scam. At least as in the sense that it actually does what it says.
The truth is a bidding fee auction is a gamble. While there is no dice rolls, you don’t know the resources of your competitors. Is there a BidButler waiting? Does it have more bids in it than yours? You simply do not know, and must make decisions based on this information you do not know. That is gambling. You are betting that you’ve got better timing and more resources to use than the others. If you are right, you will usually get a great deal. If you are wrong, you lose it all. And there are more losers than winners. Some will lose a little, some will lose a lot. Some smart people will swoop it now, and recover everything, neither winning nor loosing. But those who couldn’t afford full retail for the item in the first place (which is why they went to swoopo in the first place) are screwed.