dilettante
Jul 22nd 2009, 12:24 AM
Have you guys seen Swoopo (http://www.swoopo.com/) yet?
It's an online auction site (sort of like Ebay...only far more insidious), where one can purchase high priced electronic merchandise for a fraction of the cost. The items up for sale are new and put up by Swoopo (not other users, as on Ebay) and generally start at some stupidly low price, e.g. $0.20 for a big screen TV. Then users have 24 hours to bid and the highest bidder wins.
Looking at the site right now, there's a 50" plasma HDTV going for $101.50 with 30 seconds left in the auction, and a 47" LCD HDTV currently bid up to $33.48 with 14 seconds left to go. What a deal!
Just three things to keep in mind:
You can only bid in pre-set increments (generally $0.12). So, if the current high bid is $100.00, your bid will raise it to $100.12; you can't just bid any amount you want.
Every time anyone bids, the auction gets extended by 20 seconds, so that other people have time to out-bid you (and thus also extend the auction 20 more seconds, giving you time to outbid them...etc).
Every bid, regardless of whether you eventually win the auction or not, costs you $0.60.
Here's an insightful (and amusing) little piece on how it all works: http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2009/07/07/crack-cocaine-auction-sites?page=0,2
I bring it up because, frankly, I have tremendous respect for these people; this thing is really quite ingenious. Go to Swoopo.com; you can actually watch countdowns ticking away toward 0 on fabulously low-priced electronic goods; it's astonishingly compelling. And for just about every auction people really do walk away with merchandise at a fraction of the retail price (though, of course, never quite as small a fraction as it appears since they had to pay for all their bids as well as the final auction price). It's really a form of gambling, but it doesn't look like gambling, which is really the clever part of it.
Anyway, I'm sure it says something significant about the human psyche or the global marketplace, but at the moment all I can think of is "dang, I wish I'd thought of that."
It's an online auction site (sort of like Ebay...only far more insidious), where one can purchase high priced electronic merchandise for a fraction of the cost. The items up for sale are new and put up by Swoopo (not other users, as on Ebay) and generally start at some stupidly low price, e.g. $0.20 for a big screen TV. Then users have 24 hours to bid and the highest bidder wins.
Looking at the site right now, there's a 50" plasma HDTV going for $101.50 with 30 seconds left in the auction, and a 47" LCD HDTV currently bid up to $33.48 with 14 seconds left to go. What a deal!
Just three things to keep in mind:
You can only bid in pre-set increments (generally $0.12). So, if the current high bid is $100.00, your bid will raise it to $100.12; you can't just bid any amount you want.
Every time anyone bids, the auction gets extended by 20 seconds, so that other people have time to out-bid you (and thus also extend the auction 20 more seconds, giving you time to outbid them...etc).
Every bid, regardless of whether you eventually win the auction or not, costs you $0.60.
Here's an insightful (and amusing) little piece on how it all works: http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2009/07/07/crack-cocaine-auction-sites?page=0,2
I bring it up because, frankly, I have tremendous respect for these people; this thing is really quite ingenious. Go to Swoopo.com; you can actually watch countdowns ticking away toward 0 on fabulously low-priced electronic goods; it's astonishingly compelling. And for just about every auction people really do walk away with merchandise at a fraction of the retail price (though, of course, never quite as small a fraction as it appears since they had to pay for all their bids as well as the final auction price). It's really a form of gambling, but it doesn't look like gambling, which is really the clever part of it.
Anyway, I'm sure it says something significant about the human psyche or the global marketplace, but at the moment all I can think of is "dang, I wish I'd thought of that."