Are Swoopo Bids Created Equal?
I recently jumped into a discussion in the forums about Swoopo Free Bids. My forum friends were talking about how bids aren’t necessary worth the same amount to bidders or to Swoopo. If you pay $0.65 per bid upon sign-up, that’s probably the value you assign these bids initially. And that’s the last time you’ll be able to easily value your Swoopo bids.
If you win an auction and receive Free Bids as a result, you may value these bids differently. You didn’t pay for them after all, but more importantly, they cannot be used toward a Swoop It Now purchase.
Or what if you’re participating in an auction where you get “bids back.” These are infrequent Swoopo promotions where the winning bidder gets has all of the bids they cast returned to them at the end of the auction. What it does is essentially put the entire Swoopo model on steriods. Not only is it easy for users to ignore the concept of sunk costs, but now they’re financially incentivized to do so.
So How Much Is A Bid Worth?
I think a bid is still ultimately worth as much as you can consistently win with it. If you have a sound Swoopo strategy or a history of winning – a free bid will be just as valuable to you as a bid you paid for with cold hard cash. But knowing that Swoop It Now isn’t available for free bids, you’ll need to adjust your bid to price and understand that others may do the same.
Swoopo Shill Bidders
On Shill Bidders
I’ve handled a few emails from skeptical Swoopo bidders in the past few days. They are interested in Swoopo, but ask “Can you prove there aren’t shill bidders on Swoopo?”
Bad news: I can’t
No, I can’t prove their aren’t shill bidders on Swoopo. And I cannot prove that UFOs aren’t real and that aliens haven’t secretly been walking the earth for years.
Here’s what I can tell you…
Swoopo has existed for a few years now. They’ve had employees come in and out of the company and currently employ no fewer than a few dozen employees. They have offices in California as well as Germany. They received venture funding in 2006 in Germany and again in 2009 by a major venture capital firm in the United States.
With Swoopo Analytics, we track almost every single auction on Swoopo. We can see the bidding history of every single bidder. We’ve haven’t noticed a single thing in all this data that would suggest shill bidders.
I’ve read every single article and study written about Swoopo I can possibly find. They all have interesting conclusions regarding the Swoopo business model. But none has ever suggested with any proof that Swoopo does anything other than run auctions exactly as they describe.
I’ve won items on Swoopo’s site and received them exactly as described and in short order.
A healthy dose of skepticism is good for everyone. But at the end of the day, you need to rely on facts.
Swoopo Telephone Bidders
The other day I received an email from John who asked:
I am wondering how you work with telephone bids? How are these placed? Do you have any information on it that may pertain to the psyche of that bidder?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Here’s what I replied to John (with a little more editing since the original was written in a hurry 
Telephone bids are a relic of a by-gone Swoopo era when they were called Telebid and only took bids this way. They are no longer called Telebid, of course, but they continue to receive telephone bids into Swoopo auctions.
I would describe the phone in bidders just as I would the technique itself: relics of a by-gone era.
In my research VERY few auctions are won by phone in bids…and those folks are largely throwing money into the wind. I wouldn’t factor these people into your bidding strategy any more than I would a single bidder…and perhaps even discount their ability more. The real threat (and opportunity) on Swoopo lies with the BidButler and that will continue as long as the Internet works the way it does.
Hope that helps….and happy to hear you’re digging in!
So what are your thoughts? Have you had experience with phone in bids? Let me know in the forums…
When Do Swoopo Bids Expire?
I received this email from a 5-day Swoopo Manual Course reader named Jason today:
What the deal with the free bids? I see that they expire, but how can you use them instead of the paid bids so that I use them first and don’t risk losing them?
Here was my reply:
Jason,
Great question…FreeBids were a confusing subject for me when I first started in on Swoopo. Here’s how they work:
If you win FreeBids in a Swoopo auction, these will never expire. So these bids just get dumped into your general bid pool. Because they don’t expire, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they’re used first.
If you receive FreeBids from a Swoopo promotion, these typically expire in a week. When you bid on an auction, these expiring bids will be used first so you can be sure to get the most out of your FreeBids.
Thanks for the email,
- Matthew
Learn the powerful secrets used by top Swoopo Bidders to win BIG and get a sneak peak at the Swoopo Manual - the best guide available on how to win Swoopo auctions.