First off, don't believe the hype about Qbuids.com, a penny auction site that seems to be pretty popular. Second, don't believe all the people who are dissing the site, calling it a rip off and to avoid it at all cost. The truth is the site falls somewhere in between, it's not all that great but if you do some research and follow some simple rules you'll see that it's not exactly a rip off either.
First off, what is a Penny auction site? Basically it's an auction site sort of like Ebay (in the same way a slot machine is sort of like a PS3.) where you pay 60 cents for every bid you make. You bid against other's for the product which is on a timer. If the timer reaches 0 and you're the last person to bid you win the auction. If someone else bids the timer resets, normally it resets to 10 seconds but I've seen it reset to 20 and even 30 a few times. Each bid adds a penny to the price of the product which normally starts at 0 dollars.
I think that's the first thing most people get right away, that each bid cost 60 cents, which means if you see a product that's a dollar and 100 bids have been made on it, at 60 cents apiece that's 60 dollars for Quidids' bottom line. Not a bad business strategy if you can get away with it. It also means if you and someone else gets into a bidding war on something and each of you spend 50 bids on a product and you lose, you're not only out the product but out 30 dollars and 50 bids. So, only bid on things you want and accept the fact you might not win and, if you don't win, don't get mad cause that's just how this site works. A read a lot of reviews and most people seemed upset at this point, that they spend 100+ bids on something and lost. So, keep in mind that if you lose you will lose your bids and your money but Quibids is pretty upfront with all that so I'm not sure how people feel they've been ripped off. To get ripped off I feel you need someone to take your money in a way that you didn't know about, or sell you a product that's not worth what you spend on it.
The real appeal to the site is the fact that you can get some really good things really cheap. I saw a PS3 sell for about 5 bucks (500 bids @ 60 cents a bid, do the math cause I don't feel like it.) Saw some Gift Cards sell for about 90% of what they're worth so you do get some really good deals if you win. In fact, I got two 10 dollar gift cards for Walmart, a 50 dollar gift card for Fandango and I won about 200 free bids, all for less than five dollars so that's good.
Before placing any bid, heck before signing up I looked carefully at the site and discovered a few thing that I found, well, interesting. As you can image the site really wants you to bid a lot and they make that very, very easy with an autobid feature that is very dangerous for you and I feel it's something that, if you sign up for the site, you need to be careful with. Of all the things I saw on the site this is the one thing that I can honestly say I didn't really like and the one thing that made me uncomfortable using. Basically, you can set an autobid to bid for you if you're away from the computer of if you don't feel like clicking the button. There is a cap, 20 bids, and you can start bidding when the price gets to a certain point, but if you think about it you can see how this system favors Quibids and not the bidder. Think about it, what if you get into a bidding war with two other people who are using Autobid up to the cap? The computer will just bid and bid and bid until the other computer runs out of bids or until you do. It just seems too random, too stacked against the bidder. I hated when I went against an autobidder cause I knew I was going to have to outbid a dumb computer. In fact, if I saw a bunch of autobids for an auction I just left without bidding.
When you sign up you do need to buy at least 100 bids at 60 bucks so that's what I started with. It didn't take long for me to win a about 200 more bids (there are always auctions for more bids, another way for Quibids to get some free money.) so it's easy to get them if you want, it's always easy to lose all your bids the first day if you're not lucky or careful.
I did find a few things odd that I want to talk about here. Well, only one thing actually. It seemed that I won a lot of little auctions when I first signed up then it got harder and harder to win even the little ones. Now, I could have just gotten lucky, which is probably the case, but it did seem odd. The some kind of odd that would happen to me when I went on dating sites, wouldn't get any hits for months, then just as my membership was up I'd start getting hits again. That kind of odd, as if the site were saying "See how easy it is to win? Now, get more bids and you'll win just as easy!" I'm suspicious but without any evidence and with nothing more than a few samples I can't say exactly what I'm talking about. Like I said, it could have been dumb luck that I won all those things the first week then couldn't even sniff a win in the two weeks that followed.
So, in conclusion, I enjoyed the three weeks I played around on Quibids but I'd never go back to it. In actually it's more of a gambling site and less of an auction site. It's easy to get absorbed in it, just like it's easy to get absorbed into pushing a button on a slot machine. I did get more out of it then I put in by about 10 bucks (that 50 dollar gift card put me over the top) but, like I said, either I got lucky or the system was rigged to pull me in. That's something you'll have to figure out yourself if you ever choose to check the site out.
