Scam or scammo?

16 February 2009 | 13:01 - By Stefano Boscutti

Would you pay to bid at an auction for bargain electronic goods?

scamor_681739767

The auction hybrid site swoopo.com (previously known as telebid.com) is a strange combination of eBay, woot, carnival side show and slot machine. Here's how it works - you purchase bids at 75 cents a pop, each bid you make raises the purchase price by 15 cents and increases the auction time by 15 seconds, and once the auction ends, you pay the final price. Which sounds good in theory until you do the maths.  Recently a Macbook sold on there for the low price of $255.29, which is a great price for a Macbook if you only made a couple of bids.  However, when you add up all those 75 cent bids you realise Swoopo made $19,146.75 selling it.  Swoopo bills itself as  "entertainment shopping". Swoopo or swoop-oh!

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001196.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoopo

Share article: 
top

Join the discussion

You have characters remaining.
Validation (
) :
This is a captcha-picture. It is used to prevent mass-access by robots.

PLEASE NOTE: All submitted comments become the property of SBS. We reserve the right to edit and/or amend submitted comments. HTML tags other than paragraph, line break, bold or italics will be removed from your comment.

About this Blog

New New Media looks at how our mediascape is exploding to bits. How the latest technology and the internet are changing the way we live, work and play. How the latest media is shaping us all.

Stefano Boscutti is an executive creative director and strategist. He's like a better looking version of Todd Sampson. He also has an abiding faith that stories and wordplay (and not powerpoint presentations) will change the world.

 
ADVERTISEMENT

Other Blogs

TV
Food
Films
Documentary
World News Australia
Sport
About SBS
Business
Internet and Technology
Cycling Central
Festival Reports
Tour De France