Swoopo
transitive verb: to gain or carry off in .
How it works
This is one website where the bidders have to pay for credits that they use to bid on items. You start off by registering and then you will have to buy bid packs which cost $0.75. You have to purchase a minimum of 30($22.50), 50($37.50), 100($75), 300($225) or 700($525). (Note that bids used in an auction are not eligible for a refund.)
So you place a bid yourself or by using a bidbutler, every time you place a bid you will have to pay Swoopo $0.75 .Most “auctions” begin at $0.15 , and increase by the same amount with each “bid”. Each bid also increases the auction’s end time by 10–20 seconds.
I was curious to see how the bidding goes , so followed bid for a Nikon D90 DSLR camera (Retail Price $1200). This particular auction was a penny auction where the price of an item increases by 1 cent, each time a person bids .75 cents. The time however increases by 10-20 seconds. The item was eventually sold for $286.58 .
In order for the price to reach this far, Swoopo must have made 286.58/0.1 bids placed = 2865 bids . Each bid is worth .75 cents . The price of the item becomes a staggering $2148 . And it doesn’t end there, the winning bidder will still have to pay the winning price which was$ 286 and the delivery cost which is $15-$20, so that totals to$2454.
So is it a Scam ? Maybe, but it definitely is Unethical
7 Comments
June 18, 2009 at 2:13 pm
I believe your maths is incorrect.
The auction you followed was a penny auction so it’s 286.58/0.01 = 28658 bids at $0.75 is 28658 * 0.75 = $21493.50.
You should read the wikipedia article that has a good summary of Swoopo and it’s mechanic, along with the minimum any item has to sell by for them to make a profit.
July 1, 2009 at 10:27 pm
I think the business model is ingenious. However, I would not participate for a good number of reasons.
Being that the Business itself is making money off the bids, I would feel there would be less likelihood for any internal monitoring system from preventing a self-outbidding scheme from taking place.
Lets look at it this way.
Swoopo puts up a hot item… lets say a 50″ Plasma TV. Bidding opens up at $1.00 with a half hour bidding time.
It gets a few bids and by the time it reaches a 5-Minute marker it is still priced rather low at lets say $27.00.
Now is where the “Fun” begins. With time breaking 5-Minute marker, the bidders watching the auctions are getting more tempted to closely watch the item to try to “pick” their moment, hoping no one else is going to bid.
By the time it breaks 1 Minute remainder time on auction, the 50″ Plasma is up to $50.00. If it was a $0.01 auction item, each bid was increasing the auction price by $0.01 / increasing seconds on item by 1-4 seconds (from what I witness watching an auction today). Each bid transaction comes at a cost of $0.60. For the item to have reached a price of $50.00, there would have been4,900 bids @ $0.60 a bid for a total item sale value of $2,940.00 for that 50″ Plasma. ($49.00 / $0.01 x $0.60 = $2,940.00) I doubt they paid retail value for that 50″ Plasma, so the percentage of Markup on the item sold even at $50.00 would be well over 100%.
That’s just the icing on the cake.
Now lets say Joe Blow was banking on getting himself a cheap Plasma and this looked like too sweet a deal to pass up. Joes been bidding since the minute marker and made a grand total of 30 bids (30 bids @ $0.60 = $18.00). Lets be honest, $18.00 isn’t that much money really, but if Joe doesn’t win the bid, he spent $18.00 on absolutely nothing. Compound that by the thousands and you really got a huge rip off scheme going.
And I am hardly finished. What Joe Blow doesn’t realize, along with the hundreds of other participating bidders, is that Swoopo stacked the decks! They’ve got auto-auction bidders who will continually outbid you on every item till the final tick of the clock. “10 seconds, 8 seconds, 5 second! What, Outbid by JohnnySpot2 yet again!!!… I’ll win this TV YET!”
As I said earlier, who is monitoring these auctions to ensure that this is not happening and how is someone to know they auctions are legit? Who is to say that Swoopo hasn’t set into place an auto-bidding program behind their website for every available auction, or that they aren’t hiring people on the side to bid on the items themselves, and paying them a percentage of the bottom line $$$ markups they are making off of items. Who is tracking the items sold to ensure there are actually items being delivered to “customers” as you might think of them.
I highly doubt there is any monitoring of a site in this nature, and I am willing to bet that there is a indecipherable user agreement the length of a full series of encyclopedias covering Swoopo’s A$$ for the legality of the business they are conducting.
If that penny auction 50″ Plasma went up to $200.00 on the final sale, Swoopo brought in an astronomical $11,940.00 for a set that would have retailed $1000.00 – $2000.00 in stores today.
If Swoopo is engaging in self bidding on auctions, and they do not actually let a real bidder/customer win an auction, that $11,940.00 would be ALL PROFIT, since in fact no item was sold or delivered to a “customer”/bidder. I don’t care how they may be doing it, but I would be very skeptical on the ethics of this business and would lean towards the angle that this may in fact be the very thing they are doing.
Someone ought to have the business investigated for fraud.
Good deal or not for an individual purchase, this is capitalistic mentality at it’s dirtiest.
Hey… SWOOPO… CUT ME IN!!! I’ll bid on your auctions for you all day for a measly 1% of your profits from the auctions I partake in, and laugh my A$$ off all the way to the bank just like you are doing.
August 4, 2009 at 8:50 pm
it doesn’t even end there. their bot makes sure that none of the items is sold unless they have made its retail price several times.
August 17, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Sites like Swoopo are more for fun than for people actually looking for a bargain. I suggest you look around at the other auction sites similar to Swoopo. Hasteno.com is a new one that I’ve been playing on and I’ve actually won a couple things. Playstation 3 games going for $.08 (2 bids!) and a Nintendo Wii going for $2.16 is ridiculous. Before you completely discount the idea, you should check them out.
September 22, 2009 at 8:29 am
Run! Run away as fast as possible. Swoopo is the worst auction site in the history of the internet. Unless you are the owner of this site, your chances of winning an auction are next to impossible and lucky at best. Stick to Ebay. At least on Ebay when you put forth your best offer and lose, it wasn’t because the computer gave the rest of the world 20 seconds to reconsider their offer. Also, paying to have the computer screw you adds insult to injury! Stick to Ebay. If you lose there, at least you haven’t paid for the lucky winner’s product and the website owner’s profit.
October 24, 2009 at 11:44 pm
O.k Here is what I don’t understand. (logically anyway) Everybody who plays on Swoopo (atleast in the US and Canda can also use Rockybid.com) But why are they mostly using Swoopo when you have almost no chance to win. (rockybid has more than 50% of their items end up under $1. ) So whats the deal is rockybid legit? they do have 500 testimonials, pictures, videos, even gave away a car for $1.24. Or should I stick my dollars to Swoopo.? (I already played Swoopo, several times and lost, (less than $500 tough)) Then again swoopo has more high end items. But again little chance of winning. (rockybid has about 6 a day(and another 30 smaller items)) I am willing to invest(or have fun with) another $500 of my hard earned money; I am looking for feedback. Do I go to Rockybid or Swoopo! thanks.
November 27, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Well, if you are going to use swoopo (not recommended) you have to create a strategy, i suggest seeing how much past items have sold for and then waiting till a nintendo dsi (worth 150~) goes above 1.50 in a penny auction, that means that even if they have to send you the item, they still get 100%+ profit. I still dont recommend swoopo though.