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.

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