is there a catch to madbid,com

[pigeonshooter76]

i was wondering if there a catch to that website is it a con

[artschool]

if something is too go to be true, then its too good to be true.

[CZ550Kevlar]

The catch is the pure economics of it, you pay £1.50 or whatever it is to buy a vote, 1000 people buy votes totaling say £1500 to bid for a £300 I phone, yes the I phone cost you only £1.50 in theory but the company made £1200 profit from all the other bids. works the same with cars etc, they make more than their money for very low operating costs.

[TaxiDriver]

i was wondering if there a catch to that website is it a con

Not a Con as such,

You're paying to bid, so you could pay lots for multiple bids, for example, raising your bid amount if/when you're outbid and still not be sure of winning.

 

If you do win, then your item has cost you your winning bid plus the cost of the number of bids you had to place to be successful.

See jmilam's reply below, much much better explanation, I'd forgotten about the timer resetting aspect of it, talk about keep moving the goalposts.

Edited March 29, 2011 by TaxiDriver

[jmilam]

I was Reading upbon the site the other day myself I was thinking of trying but couldn't be bothers in the end.

This was the most helpful thing I found to explain taken of google.

 

Money Making Machine

Is it me, or is no one else seeing the behind the scenes here?? All these sites, madbid, fastbid and all the other pay per bid (timer restricted) websites out there aren't necessarily scams, not as per definition of the word "scam"... but more like a ingenious way of making thousands of £££'s using the end-users greed and lack of understanding of what lays under the surface.

>

The items are legitimate, postage is free and you definitely get the item in question - so really no scam here... now here's the catch (and please let me not be the only one to see this):

 

Let's say that you buy the pack of 40 bid for £24.00, what you basically doing is pay £1.66 per bid (40/£24.00). Each bid you place when you hit that [bID NOW!] button is equivalent, or actually is 1p (one penny!!). Right here you should start asking yourself questions, but this isn't it yet!! So you are basically paying £1.66 per every 1p. Now this is not what will bring you to stop because, technically, you could win a bid by just bidding once (very unlikely but true). So "technically" you could have actually bided only once (£1.66) for something and won... e.g - ooooh let's say you were going for that LG 50" Plasma TV I'm looking at right now - current cost £100.31, so you place your bid and for some REALLY strange reason no one else bids... YOU WON! So this telly would have actually only cost you £101.98 (cost of plasma tv £100.32(incl your 1p) + your bid cost £1.66)! No gimmicks, no scam... but the likelihood of that bid stop at £100.31 - very low! So again you should see where this is going - if after you enter your bid and if someone else also really wants that telly (which is most likely what will happen) he/she will hit that [bID NOW!] button and there it goes, price goes up and so does the timer. Next thing you know you are bidding once again... and on and on and on.... the psychological effect of looking at a price of something and seeing it go up by pennies instead of pounds is extreme... you will forget for a second that you are actually paying £1.66 per every penny that the item goes up(on your bid).

>

So by now all this should have made you stop, think twice and revaluate if this is the best option of getting it on to a great bargain. If this hasn't deterred you yet, think about something else: who is to say (and no theory of conspiracy here) that there aren't planted bidders who ensure that that item doesn't sell too low? People do it all the time on ebay...

Now how do this people make money? They're not only making money, they're actually "printing it"!!

Quick Calc

Same telly:

LG 50" Plasma TV - sold for £101.38

How many bids were needed to bring the price of that telly up to that price?? I'll tell you - 101.38 x 100 = 10,138 bids (100 pennies per pound = 100 bids per every pound)!!! C'mon don't you see it yet??? 10,138 x £1.66 = £16,829.08. We have collectively, as bidders paid for that telly £16,829.08!!!! Either I'm miscalculating something here or this is a cash making machine!

Hope this helps! Please reply!

[cowboy1403]

another thing to watch on mad bid is the items are split into 3 sub cats.cheap,middle and exspensive items.on a cheap item 1 bid = 1 penny increase = £1.66 on a middle price item 1 bid = 1 penny increase =2x£1.66 and an exspensive item costs you 1 bid = 1 penny increase = 3x£1.66 so a exspencive item costs you £4.98 to go up 1p