Every auction result is posted for all to see with the successful bidders total costs to purchase including bid price, courier fee and individual cost of the successful bidders bidding.

Every auction result from the first ever auction has been posted. There is nothing to hide and it is not difficult to calculate the BidRivals profit margin.

It was however staggering the lengths some people would go to secure a successful bid, including paying near to, and sometimes well over, retail price.

The rules of bidding are all over the webpage. Bidders are prohibited from winning more than 2 successful bids in one 24 hr period and no more than 6 in any calendar month. There is an online assistant to answer any questions and on the two occasions I have requested advice, I have been answered immediately and accurately.

I have only ever used the two free bids that were emailed to me and both bids were unsuccessful. I have not, nor will I ever foolishly waste money in a bidding war with a BidAgent. If I want to bid on something, I will be as strategic about it as if I was buying anything at auction.

If you have wasted money bidding unsuccessfully, don’t whine about it. Learn from it. BidRivals is as open and transparent as a business should have to be.

I hope to bid on, and be successful in purchasing my wife a Nikon D90 camera but it may not be the next camera along or the one after that.

And if I should fail after spending a sum of money bidding, BidRivals will allow me to purchase the item at retail LESS the amount I have spent on my unsuccessful bid. It cannot be fairer than that.

There are numbers of BidRivals auctions that result in a loss for BidRivals. THEY DO NOT WIN EVERY TIME; sometimes they do but everyone has the chance to bid for premium products at bargain prices and most times, the auction winner has snapped a bargain.

Fools and their money are parted on lots of ventures. I am sure some of the penny auction sites are scams. I have yet to see anything unethical about BidRivals in fact I have seen examples of amazing openness but I will continue to be vigilant and judgemental and I hope you will be too.

Yahuweh’s blessings to you all

Grab a bid bastards stole $50 from me.
I bid a little then I understood it is Impossible to win and gave up on my money.

I wish they become sick and spend all the money they stole from people for pain killers that won’t work.

Sign: (-50)

The other thing that was that I google-earthed the support address that was given on the grab-a-bid website and realised it was the MacDonalds building in Johnsonville, Wellington. The building backs on to two streets and it’s official address was the other street address. I have only visited McD a couple of times in J’ville so there may be other businesses in that building but I don’t remember them.

Anyway, I see grababid has shut down now but http://nz.ipennybid.com/ looks like the same content repackaged.

The interesting thing is that they don’t put auction id numbers on the auctions anymore so you can’t track how long the auctions run for.

Wow.

Jane, thanks for posting that comment, it’s very informative. From what you’ve said, the site appears to be nothing more than a scam, and it may not be possible to win at all. The problem is that without access to the web server records it’s actually impossible to prove.

Would it be worth bringing this to the attention of the commerce commission?

I got up Monday morning at 2am to bid. I though this was a good choice as noone else would be around to bid compared to a Saturday night/Sunday morning auction. I lasted from 2:30 to 7:20 in the morning when I had to stop with the auction still running. I checked back a little later and the auction only lasted about 15-20 minutes more.

The optimum strategy is not to bid until you have to i.e. to bid when the counter gets down to 1 or 2 seconds. In using this strategy over 3 auctions that night I only bid around 15 bids. “People” were bidding at the 30 second to go mark which is really sub-optimal. I suspect the reason is that the problems with timing issues over the internet would become apparent if all bids went down to the wire and we’d all realise that the sight was dodgy.

I saw some other dodgy stuff. I bid before the timer ended on the summary page but when I went to the auction page the bidder before me won. I followed auction 11602 and thought it had been going for a while so I kept track of it – it lasted at least from 16/05/2009 to 30/06/2009 which was when I stopped tracking it. The auction over 1 1/2 months had only 434 bidders. Hmmmm!

The other thing was that it chewed through data at great knots. We have a large cap and we are never in trouble with going over but this site put us right up to our limit with about 8 hours continuous monitoring.

Trademe loses out if someone doesn’t win an auction. For grababid (or any other penny auction/pay up front site) it’s in their interests not to have you win. My recommendation is to stay away from these sites.