Wooters Consumer Blog - Ipod, Credit cards, Car Stereos, Cigars

For those of you who don’t know what Swoopo is don’t be alarmed it’s not a new move on the monkey bars, your friends don’t have a leg up on you there.  No, it’s a new auction site aimed at people with big bank rolls and champagne dreams.  It works like this…

The concept is easy enough, buy bids for the chance of getting an item for far less than retail.  Sounds good right??  Well yes and no.

You go to the site and register, you have to automatically fund your account with bids.  Bids cost $1 each and are used to purchase these “deals”.  They have different bid packages:

BidPack XXL - 750 Bids for $500.00

BidPack XL - 300 Bids for $200.00

BidPack L - 150 Bids for $100.00

BidPack M - 75 Bids for $50.00

BidPack S - 30 Bids for $20.00

Yes that’s right $500!! Wow are they nuts?  That’s a lot of money to try and win and I mean “win” because you are throwing money at products you have a very slim chance of winning.  I spent well over 2 hours on the site, put my $20 bucks up and started to try my luck.  This place is brutal, you have people going in every 10 seconds placing more and more bids on the same product trying to win.  Everytime they hit the bid button is $1, I would hate to think how many times they are pressing that button.

I tried to win 300 more bids, it is a 100% off auction meaning there will be close to 1000 bids before anybody wins it.  Hmm, 1000 bids = $1000 and they are offering a 300 bid $300 for it.  Good business model or crooked?  Maybe gambling?  Of course it’s gambling, you are waggering hundreds of dollars to try and get a product you may never see.  Of the 30 bids I bought I didn’t win one thing, and I was really trying.  I would stay away from this site as I would assume 10% of people who actually actively bid get their money back on wins.