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05 June 2012
TM
IBid2Save, a licensed auction firm that launched October 16th, 2011, does a lot of promoting on how you can get a great deal on their site. The question though, is there any deals to be had. They have a very nice web presence, clean interface and well running script whose timers are very accurate. They pride themselves also on their User Account dashboard and statistics panel, that has some very extensive charts, and graphs that show how much money one has saved based on the return on investment (ROI) numbers. But do these numbers really pan out?
This bidder is very skeptical as to how much has been saved, even though they report that I have. Let's look at the bid pack(35,50,75,100,250,500,1000) prices which have bids at 60 cents each which is pretty competitive in the penny auction market. So I bought the conservative bidpack of 35 and started my journey.
As I looked for an auction, I found some $20 gift cards, which were a couple days off, and had some pricier shipping than I've seen on other site, $4.99. But I though if I can get that for half my bids, then I should make out about 50-60% off which is respectable. As the auctions count down, I see the bidding going crazy on the bid butler. Hundreds and hundreds of bids placed on this auction. And it's taking forever as the bid butler works a bit differently than a lot of sites. You put your bids in the butler and it just takes off. No control on price range. Curious to the odd and crazy bidding, I found out that Ibid2save gives out some crazy amount of promotional bids. In fact all the auctions have promobids attached. FREE BIDS are AWESOME! Right? Wrong....
IBid2Save has a BuyItNow option on their auctions, but promo bids don't count toward the BIN price when placed on an item. Here's the twist and what is wrong with IBid2Save. Let's analzye an auction:
http://www.ibid2save.com/auctions/8gbmicromemory-1139534
1. Auctions that have Promo Bids Attached(most of them) with an item actually increase the value of the auction in IBid2Save's logic. So a 8Gb SD Card that has MSRP of $45.00 may have 40 Promo bids attached and those raise the Auction's value to $124.00. So you pay the final auction price and shipping which is about $7.99. TONS OF SAVINGS.... Well no.
2. Remember those promo bids are worth nothing on your next auction toward BIN. They are good to raise the value of the auction, but not usable on BIN? How much more value is being placed on those bids in this auction? 40 bids @ .60 per bid (if you bought a bidpack) should be $24.00 and Ibid2Save raised the auction value almost $80.00 or $2.00 per bid.
3. Next, you will see is where the stretch in the term savings is getting really out of hand. Unlike all other Penny Auction sites that have a Shipping Fee, IBid2Ssave has another "Auction Fee" which is 10% of the auction value as IBid2Save see that value from above. So this 8Gb SD card has a shipping fee of $7.99 and an auction fee of $4.99. $12.98 for this item, and you get 40 promo bids. Ok. the $4.99 is not 10% of the IB2S value listed in this auction. This is an exception, and probably an error on their part. Most items are 10% for Auction fee.
4. Lastly, a quick check of Amazon shows that this item is sold for $4.29, almost a 3rd of the price of the IB2S AuctionFee + ShippingFee.
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-8GB-microSD-Card/dp/B004KSOBSK
When you add it all up, you end up with a bunch more Promo Bids that don't buy you much more because every auction has promo bids which inflate the auction price and can't be used toward BIN. There are almost always enough promo bids used to inflate the auction price so that the 10% Auction fee is higher than what you can buy items at retail. Any items where this is not the case, there are so many bidders placing bids, that the final auction price will take the value over retail as well. Even with only 1 bid placed on the auctions.
You would be nuts to buy any bids at their .60 per bid price. You can get promo bids by liking them on Facebook, participating in some of their many offers from affiliate partners. Get a few promo bids, and place it on any promo bid auction, which deflates the bid price to about .06 per bid when you pay the auction fee on those auctions.
IBID2SAVE.... You be the judge!
Remember folks.. Do your homework before you bid.
Then buy the item at Amazon!
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