Quibids.com? Scam or wave of the bidding future?

Arson Welles

Has anyone used this before? It seems like a super scam, but if it isn't it is very interesting.

If you haven't heard of it, you buy bids ($.60/bid) and then bid on items. I guess if I bid on something, I would use one of my bids, and then if you wanted to bid against me, you would use your bid. You don't choose the next bid price, you only use one of your bids.

I just don't know how reputable this is, like I said, it seems super scammy.

y2jake215

Scam. Not to mention how easy it is for them to screw you (why not have employees/bots bid against you? They can "buy back" every product they "sell" and still make money off of you), a quick Google brings up complaints of $60 fees when it was supposedly free to join, etc. Avoid

godmode

It's legitimate, but it is incredibly difficult to actually win the items, because you have to buy the bids themselves, then you spend a bid every time you try to win, and there is infinite amounts of split-second sniping.

You can get lucky, but it's not really something you should reasonably count on.

Edit: Oh, or it could be a scam too!

Aioua

Google led me to this which seems to be a good explanation of how it works, and how they're running the scam.
Personally I wouldn't want to gamble with a casino that wasn't even honest enough to admit to being a casino.

y2jake215

It's definitely at the very borderline of legitimate at the absolute best. I'm sure there are a few success stories but I think the overwhelming majority of the times you try to use the site you'll end up down some money and without any product.

Cultural Geek Girl

The entire thing is designed around the sunk cost problem: for everyone who gets a $1000 laptop for $300, there is a crop of other, losing bidders who spent $10,000 on bids but did not win the right to "purchase" the final item. Also, the site shows auctions ending with no bids (or absurdly low bids) on the front page when you're not signed in, but these are fake. I once read an article where someone tried to find an auction like that when he wasn't signed in, and then sign in and find the same auction, and it was impossible.

While it may be "legit," in that it is possible to win, it is basically gambling with horrible sunk costs and a payout of maybe 1 in 10. Someone did the math on a sample auction that technically "sold" for less than its retail price, and showed most auctions take in more total bidding fees than their wholesale price anyway.

It's not just a scam (though it may partially be a scam), it's one of those sites that preys upon those who don't bother to understand how it works, or those who are bad at math.

From a comment on a scam warning site, this explains the math quite nicely:

Quibids Wholesale cost of the Laptop?: About $1,400.00 (retail $1,800.00)
Sold for: $300.00 (equal to 30,000 bids, at 60 cents each, giving Quibids $18,000.00 in bid revenue). Remember the bids Cost the user 60 cents each and the bid goes up only a penny each time you bid. There are several people bidding a penny at a time costing them 60 cents for EVERY bid.

Here is the final math: (note, this is an rounded-off estimate of an actual auction that closed recently)

30,000 bids cost the aggregate bidders a total of $18,000.00! EIGHTEEN-THOUSAND Dollars!, for ONE laptop.
One lucky person wins the item for $300.00, PLUS the number of his/her own bids. This is variable. I seen what appear to be people who've walked away with a win after only bidding a few times, and others (the stubborn ones) bidding hundreds of times.

Edit: even after this, someone could interpret this as me saying "oh, once you learn how it works, it's actually great!" I am not saying that. I think the site is evil and stupid and such a bad idea and you really should not use it, in my opinion. Even if you think you can "beat" the system, the calculations above show that the vast majority of people lose a lot of money. And even if you do get lucky, I wouldn't want to support a site that harms the vast majority of its customers.

Wezoin

Yeah, first time you hear about sites like this it sounds awesome. But it's very difficult to win. I decided I was gonna try one of them one time, bought about $25 in bids, picked an item, charted the average end times and end prices of that product for the last few months, looked for auctions that were about that price at about that time, and still failed miserably. There is no strategy that works and you end up screwed in the long run. The site I was part of even let you buy the product at retail- the cost of your bids at the end of the auction, but the retail prices the listed were about 50% higher than normal retail.

see317

So, to answer the OP: Quibids: Scam or Wave of the future?
Yes.

It's a scam because it's damned near impossible to win, and could easily be made completely impossible to win by the owners.
However, it's also the wave of the future because nearly every thing they sell makes the owners an insane amount of cash, and people love insane amounts of cash. I mean, quibids isn't even the only site running this kind of operation, I know beezid does the same thing and I'm fairly sure I've seen ads for at least two others using the same general business model.

godmode

In fact, just as I opened up this thread a moment ago, a commercial for "skoreit.com" came on the TV: another similar site.

Skoal Cat

Don't forget that every bid increases the amount of time its available for. Hello unlimited last minute bidding.

Tejs

It's legitimate, but a bad idea.

Each auction works like so; the price starts at X, and then increments in some penny amount incremenets per bid. Each time a bid occurs, the time, if below a certain threshold, resets to that threshold. When you've "won" the id, you then pay for the cost of the item at that bid price including shipping. So let's take an example:

An apple iPad goes on auction starting at $0.02, incrementing by 2 cents per bid. Every time someone bids when less than 15 seconds is left on the auction resets the counter to 15 seconds left on the auction.

After 2 days of bidding (or whatever), the price is finally set at $63.46. The winner pays $63.46 + shipping for the item. However, that means that when this auction was finished, there were (63.46 - 0.02) / $0.02 = 3172 bids on the item to get it to that price.

At Quibids prices, that means people spent $1903.20 on bids ALONE, and of that, only one person won the 'bid' to pay for the item. If 300 people were bidding on the item, that means that, on average, they sent about 10.5 bids for the item, or about six dollars or so. Of that 300 people, only 1 person actually bought the item, so 299 people basically payed Quibids six bucks for absolutely nothing, and 1 person payed them $69.46 + shipping for the iPad.

If the iPad sold normally for 500 bucks at the Apple Store, Quibids made 1966.66 - 500 = $1466.66 in profit for selling that same iPad, compared to apple.

In addition to this, you're only allowed to 'win' 3 auctions per 24 hour period, and then 8 auctions per month or so. Furthermore, Quibids reserves the right to only show certain auctions to you; you dont search the full catalog of auctions available and then choose what you want to bid on, you choose from among the options Quibids presents for you to bid on.

Long story short, you'll probably spend less money in the long run by simply buying the items you want at full price from the actual retailer than by buying it through Quibids. For the lucky few that managed to get nice savings, it was a gamble that paid off.

deanomac24

Here is a video I did regarding how Quibids is a scam. For anyone that needs to contact them their contact information is included in the description portion of of the video.



Thanks for watching. Don't forget to share the video and rate,comment and subscribe. Cheers

The Crazy Dad Channel

Jasconius

It's effectively a scam but mostly because of the way it's employed on their site.

As far as I've been made aware, their bidding system itself is extremely simple and prone to synchronization flaws, overlapping bids, etc... a subject of consumer reports on the local news.

And 60 cents per bid is insanely high... which tells you they are either going to the bank, or not many real customers are participating