Bidstick.com review?

March 11, 2009 2:28 PM

Looking for a review of http://www.bidstick.com/. Anyone use this auction site before or know if it is legit? Thanks!
posted by chump to Shopping (4 answers total)

The premise behind it seems to be that you pay them money just to be able to bid. That alone sets off alarms.

This article explains why they are bad deals.

So, they're most likely legit in terms of actually selling the item for the amount you bid, but good luck winning an auction. A horrible deal in general. Also as a side note, eponysterical.
posted by Saydur at 2:53 PM on March 11, 2009 [2 favorites]

Bidstick seems especially bad as they can just pause the timer if they haven't had enough bids yet:

Why did an auction pause?
Bidstick reserves the right to pause any of the auctions at anytime and for any reason.

posted by JonB at 2:15 PM on March 12, 2009

Wikipedia has a good article on dollar auctions which a blog post gives an example of in this swoopo auction where the winning bidder, Schulz490183, spent $1,515.00 on bids to win a laptop worth only $1,399.99. Once they'd spent say $1000 on bids they were then willing to pay over the laptop's worth in order to not have wasted the money spent so far. Pretty horrific!
posted by JonB at 2:34 PM on March 12, 2009

I once spent a night shift sat with colleagues watching swoopo auctions and dreaming of coming up with such an easy way to enlarge the fool/money divide. The speed of the bids and the whole premise leads me to believe there are more a lot than one born every minute.

The true value of these sites is in marvelling at human ingenuity/credulity simultaneously.
posted by fullerine at 7:28 PM on March 12, 2009