Archive for the 'Fundamentals' Category

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.

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.

We have an entire category devoted to different auction types.  Make sure you check out that section as it explains in detail the different auctions and associated strategies you can take.

Swoopo is an entertainment auction site.  You will be seduced by the clever marketing that shows people winning amazing items for 90% of the retail value.  This is absolutely true, but the catch is that every time you bid for an item you must pay.

For example, I am bidding on a flat screen TV currently going for $10. That is an amazing deal.  Here is where it gets complicated.  When you bid the time remaining in the auction goes up 15 seconds, the price goes up .15 and you just burned through one of your bids.  By the way, your bids cost .75 a piece.

This is how Swoopo is able to let items go at such seemingly low prices.  If an item costs $100 and the Auction ends with the item selling for $20 Swoopo keeps the $20 the person pays for the item.  Additionally, during the course of the auction they made $100 in bids.  Even if they pay full retail for an item in the auction they have still made $20 off the entire deal by the bid revenue.

Why does this work?  Well, quite simply because we are all greedy and think that we can get something on the cheap.  The truth is you can do this, but the game is tricky and there are rules that need to followed.

This is meant to be a high level overview and we will get into more strategies with future posts.