"We've already become one of the leading online penny auctions in the U.S."
"... a fun and rewarding shopping experience ..."
"I've tried to create a new auction experience ..."
Every few days another of the e-mails arrives for a new "auction shopping" site. Last July, I wrote an article about Swoopo.com, a site that uses a complicated auction system in which shoppers pay to "bid" on items using Swoopo credits they buy for about 60 cents each. You can read the story, but you can get the gist from the headline: "The Crack Cocaine of Auction Sites." Does that sound like a positive story to you?
A positive story it was not. I wrote that Swoopo was pernicious and for most folks would end up being a bad deal. Still, the e-mails from Swoopo imitators"”Wavee, BidZilla, QuiBid"”keep coming. Each has a model that's a tiny bit different in one detail or another. Some are just plain confusing"”the technology news site TechCrunch ended its advertising partnership with one auction bidding site, BigDeal, saying that readers couldn't figure out how it worked from BigDeal's tutorial.
Still, the sites keep on coming, all jostling for a mention in the press, good or (apparently) even bad, hoping to burn their names into consumer memory, or maybe raise their Google (GOOG) page rank with more mentions. Clearly, once someone builds a mouse trap that auctions off cheese, the world follows with cheese auction traps aplenty.
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