Swoopo NailBiter Auction

Published on May 23, 2009 in Auction Types. 0 Comments

In this auction Bid Butlers are not allowed.  This auction requires good timing and patience.  You should also have a very reliable computer and stable Internet connection.

The key to this type of auction is being able to go the distance.  You want to find a key amount of buffer time that you can get your bid in without missing your opportunity.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in this type of auction is not bidding.  Often times they will count the number of bidders and see that several people are bidding.  Typically you will see four people bidding.  Everyone thinks the other three will bid at the last section to increase the time.  What happens is that everyone ends up staring at each other wondering why they didn’t bid and how that other guy ended up with their prize.

Swoopo – Penny Auction

Published on May 23, 2009 in Auction Types. 0 Comments

This is similar to other auction types with the exception that instead of the price rising $0.15 it rises a penny.  This is an advanced auction type.  Typically higher priced items are listed under the penny auction type.  If timed well this can be extremely profitable, but they are also very competitive.

Consider the case of a $1,199 television penny auction I recently saw listed.  The final price for the 42 inch Philips television was $24.07.  For the guy who had to buy this in the end it was a total steal.  Remember that this was a penny auction so all bidders combined spent $1,807 dollars on this auction.  Not a bad deal for Swoopo.  Even if you had the majority of the bids you may have come out ok, but you have to be willing to spend a lot and not screw up in the end.

Sometimes you can do well even if you have the majority of the bids.  I’ve seen a 37 inch go for $7.05 when it retails for $1,299.  Even if you had all of the bids you would have only spent $528.

The important thing to understand about penny auction is that it is very easy to get in at the end, but in order to win you may need to spend hundreds of dollars in bids and even after spending hundreds there is no guarantee you will win.

Swoopo Bid Butler – Running Out of Bids

Published on May 23, 2009 in Advanced Strategies. 0 Comments

Running Out of Bids

The first way you can lose is not setting your number of bids high enough.  Let’s take the example of working against a single opponent bidding against you.  In this example you both start bidding at $10.

  • You $10 (Bid 1)
  • Opponent $10.15
  • You $10.30 (Bid 2)
  • Opponent $10.45
  • You $10.60 (Bid 3)
  • Opponent $10.75
  • You $10.90 (Bid 4)
  • Opponent ($11.05)
  • You $11.20 (Bid 5)
  • Opponent $11.35 (Winner)

Son of a.  If you set the Bid Butler bids too low then you run the risk of losing because you were not placing enough bids.  Luckily you can add more bids to your Bid Butler, but you must start $1 higher than the current end price you want to bid on.  In other words, you may need to start with a Bid Butler, add more to your Bid Butler and then use single bids to get it up to the point where your Bid Butler starts working again.

Did you catch that?  It was really important.  Using our example from above let’s say we ran out of bids with our Bid Butler and want to use this feature again.  My bid butler would need to be set to $12.35, but the bid will never get there because we’re in Swoopo land not regular auction land.  My opponent is already winning so he can’t bid again.  You only have 15 seconds to reactivate the Bid Butler.  You may set it to $12.35 to kick back in, but the whole time the clock is ticking.  After you set it you need to click Single bid to move the price to $11.50.  You have to keep using single bid against your opponent until the price gets above $12.35 and then you can rely on your bid butler.

But wait, if you read some of the other posts you remember that having too many bids qued up in your Bid Butler can cause a cascading effect where you and another Bid Butler burn through bids faster than Lebron James driving a lamborghini.

This is what makes Swoopo difficult and frustrates people not only do you have to understand the fundamentals of Swoopo you must understand that you cannot have one blanket strategy that works every time.  You must read the room and know who else is involved.  Future post will be related to reading the room and when to apply the correct strategy.

Bidding on Swoopo – Bid Butler

Published on May 23, 2009 in Fundamentals. 1 Comment

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.

Bidding on Swoopo – Single Bid

Published on May 23, 2009 in Fundamentals. 0 Comments

Bidding is the heart of swoopo and there are two different ways to bid.

Single Bid

The single bid is the easiest way to get started.  You simply click the bid button when you feel like bidding.

When you do this the price of the item rises $0.15 and you use up one of your bids that you paid $0.75 for.

In order to use the single bid option you must be very focused and have a steady Internet connection.  If you are towards the end of a bidding session and your Internet connection fails you will be unable to place future bids and you will lose.  Additionaly, I have found that you can’t just rely on the countdown timer.  Due to the Internet connection or speed of your computer the timer may jump from 12 to 4 seconds and not do a normal countdown.  If you aren’t watching carefully you will screw up your timing and lose. We have some future posts on how to deal with this issue specifically.

Auction Types

Published on May 23, 2009 in Fundamentals. 0 Comments

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.

Buying Bids

Published on May 23, 2009 in Fundamentals. 0 Comments Tags: .

One of the first things you need to do to get started with Swoopo is to buy bids.  Bids allow you to play the game and try to win items at low prices.

In your eagerness to win that great gizmo you quickly sign up for bids without fully thinking through the consequence of your decision.  Buying bids is as much a part of the game as bidding itself.

Swoopo has very craftily created a bid pack system.  Instead of allowing you to buy bids as you need them you are forced to pay for them in certain quantities.

You will notice that you can buy a pack of bids with the following options

700 for $525

300 for $225

100 for $75

50 for $37.50

30 for $22.50

The very top one says the BidPack for the “big bargain.”  Your emotion is telling you that is a deal and that you should go for the big bargain because you always get a quantity discount.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Every bid is worth exactly .75.

Purchasing bids in set quantities is advantageous for Swoopo.  Primarily it works like this, you are hot and heavy into a bidding war with someone you load up on bids to take them down to the mat. You win your prize.  You are victorious.  You also didn’t use all of your bids from your last bid pack.  You may only have 10 bids left.  At this point you are forced to make a decision.  Do I write off my $7.50 in bids or do I go load up again to try and win something else.

Interestingly, psychologists have shown that people adapt their behavior more towards a feeling of loss.  In other words, you don’t want to lose those 10 bids.  The only way to not lose those bids is to turn around buy more and win something else.  Whoever created Swoopo probably has some major PhD in psychology and human behavior.

Does this mean that you want to pick the smallest bid pack to minimize the possibility of having unused bids?  Of course, the answer is that it depends.  If you are bidding on a large ticket item that gets hot and heavy where you are bidding every ten seconds the last thing you want to do is miss out because you didn’t have enough bids.

If you already placed a hundred dollars in bids for a TV and then the TV went on the next minute, but you couldn’t play because you ran out of bids you would feel pretty awful.  One of the keys to Swoopo is being committed to your strategy and seeing it through.  We’ll talk more abou that in future posts.

For now, just understand how buying bids works and realize that the actual amount saved per winning auction will be skewed by the amount of unused leftover bids.

What is Swoopo?

Published on May 23, 2009 in Fundamentals. 0 Comments

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.