Win an auction with unusual bid

[Itsme]

Sounds dumb to me...

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Win an auction with unusual bid

ASSOCIATED PRESS

May 1, 2006

Add this to the list of ideas that never would have worked before the Internet: an auction site where you don't have to be the highest bidder to win.

The idea at Ottawa-based UniqueAuction.com is to come up with the highest “unusual” bid. So someone who bids 48 cents on an item can beat someone who was willing to pay $15 – as long as no one else also bid exactly 48 cents, and multiple people bid $15.

The site makes money by charging $2 per bid, or $1 for “platinum” members who pay $100 a year. As a result, items go for ridiculously low prices. For example, the maximum price listed for an Xbox 360 game console on the site one recent week was $4.04.

Brothers Rocky and Arif Mirza, who launched the site in September, say the bid history is viewable, allowing anyone to foil another person's bid by matching it so it is no longer unique. UniqueAuction spokesman Scott Ledingham says the site has signed up 10,000 platinum members and raked $3 million in bid fees alone.

[Paymaster]

OK, so the person who got the xbox 360 probably had to bid a few hundred times (at one dollar each) to "cancel out" the bids of others. So this is great marketing to say that the xbox sold for $4.04, but the actual price was much higher, I am sure...

[Paymaster]

Ugh... so yeah, bid history is viewable, but it doesn't say which bids have been cancelled out, so you be wasting money bidding amounts that are already invalid. The bid history also isn't sorted by amount, so you may have to wade through hundreds of bids to choose a unique amount. Finally, some auctions have a "reserve"- this means that it has to get a minimum number of bids before it will actually sell.

So basically the final selling price is meaningless. They might as well call it a raffle.