Penny Auctions

Monday, 20 June 2011

A while back i was all fired up about trying to figure out online penny auctions. Since then i sort of gave up, but i wrote down what my plan was.

In case you don't know there are tons and tons of sites on the internet called "penny auctions." They are sort of a combination between an auction and ebay. The trick is that you have to pay for every time you bid. Quibids.com is just one of those sites. It's the site i decided to focus on.Here you pay 60 cents for every time you bid. At first glance it looks like an amazing deal. Tv's being sold for $50, two-hundred dollar gift cards being bought for $9. The thing you have to remember is that the bidding started at 1 cent and for it to get up to $30, that means that it received 5000 bids at 60 cents per bid. That means that the web site made 5000 * 0.60 = $3,000 for the TV. The site makes it's money when things are being bid on thousands of times. There are hundreds of these sites and they all basically look and work the same way.

Quick, hurry up and bid on that Xbox, you have 19 seconds and you can get it for $1.42. So you bid $1.43, spending 60 cents in the process. Then 3 seconds later someone else bids $1.44. This process keeps going and going.

You sign up, buy a number of bids (100 bids costing $60 at Quibids.com) and then you can start bidding on whatever you'd like.

A great site is bidcentz.com which keeps track of some of the items sold, at what date, time and price Most people just bid without any information, sometimes they get lucky. But my goal was to have as much information as possible about history, trends, etc, so the site bidcentz.com helped a lot. Let me just say now that this is still a total shot in the dark, i didn't try any of this, it was just an experiment to see if it could work.

I decided to look at 2 of their popular items. 1 expensive item and 1 cheaper item.

• Item #1 - Apple iPad 16Gb Wi-Fi. This, along with the 32 and 64 Gb models are very popular on the site. They can sell for as little as $3 and as much as $90

• Item #2 - $100 gift card. They are not as popular and usually sells around $10

Again, the key thing to remember here is: the website doesn't make money on the final price, they make money on the number of bids. The iPad retail price is $600. That means at 60 cents per bid, the website profits anytime the price reaches $10. 1000 bids * 0.60 = $600 on average the iPad sells on their site for $35. That means on average they get $2,100 for each one they sell.


The trick, I THINK, is to follow the trends to find a date and time and you can narrow down when to bid. For example IF on every Friday at 6pm one sells for between $30 and $40, then there's no real point in bidding between $0 and $30. Odds are that it won't sell then.

I started tracking what would be the best times to buy and iPad. It turned out to be early on Tuesday's and 4pm on Friday's. Around those times they usually sold for less than $4. It was basically just a little bit of information to narrow down times and prices, giving you an advantage of when to bid. Sort of like investing in the stock market.

But this is the point where i gave up. I never signed up and tested to see if the bidding strategy would work.

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The PIR

Sunday, 20 June 2010

As i had said a few weeks ago, my buddy John and i were on the Price is Right in LA.
The reason why we didn't get to sit together is that we showed up at 8:30 and we were just about the last people in the studio, out of 316 people we were 309 and 310. We lucked out and barely made it. So when we walked in to the studio they split us up. John went to the right, got screwed and had to sit in the last row. I went to the left, somehow lucked out and sat right up front behind contestants row.



Here's me telling the contestants what to bid. If they would have listened to me they would have won every time but once. For example in this picture i was telling her to bid $1000. The winning bid...$1000.
Here was the funniest part of the show, when Roy got up there and bid $200 for a wicker chair. It ended up being $1400. It was the worst bid. Drew even joked around during the commercial with his family on how bad it was.
John in the back row surrounded by all the people in red shirts
Some quick things to know about the show:

• they film 2 shows a day but to be sure to get on the show you should probably get there before 7am. then in our case they said they had 50 empty seats for the second show and people could stay in their seats and see that too

• before you get to be in the audience you have to sit/stand for hours in 2 different lines, where you hold colored tickets with numbers on them. for example they might say "ok i need all the people with blue tickets, numbers 1-200 to line up here"

• they have a brief "interview" with people to decide on who to call up (ie. the sailor and the woman who's 60th birthday it is)

• no camera or cell phones allowed. you have to go through a metal detector and leave your phone in a cardboard box.

• the studio is way smaller then it looks on tv

• the stage is also a lot smaller then you think

• the announcer, Rich Fields, talks before the show and is really funny. he tries to tell you what to do and where to go when if you get called up

• Drew talks to the crowd between commercials, while they are setting up the games and he was also really funny.

• there are about 15 people and 3 cameras on the stage during the show, making it difficult to see what's going on from the audience

• it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to hear anything that drew or the announcer is saying. they want you to clap and cheer constantly and their microphones don't amplify out to the crowd so it's real confusing.

• when they say "Joe Smith, come on down..." you can't hear that at all so they have 2 people up on stage that hold up big signs with "Joe Smith" written on it.

• it did seem a lot more difficult when you're there compared to sitting on the couch at home. especially for the first two games it was weird, but by the end you got the hang of it.

• many of the people in the crowd were their for their 2nd or 3rd time. one guy in the crowd was from Hawaii and it was his 16th time on the show. but most of the repeat attendees are from the LA area. they said that the record was this guy who was on 69 times before he finally got called up to contestants row.

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