QuiBids: Best Avoided
Published at 11:34 on 11 January 2012
While looking at The Guardian’s website this morning, I noticed an ad for an on-line auction company called QuiBids, which listed some about-to-close auctions with temptingly low bid amounts.
Realizing that it might be too good to be true, I decided to investigate a little. Because, on the other hand, if it’s not some sort of sleazy ripoff site that charges you simply to place a bid (whether it wins or not), even if only a small fraction of the items go for pennies on the dollar, it could really pay to keep an eye on things and slap bids on anything that looks like it’s going to sell for a song. I probably wouldn’t win every time, of course, but at those prices it would be worth celebrating the wins and ignoring the ones that got away. It’s hard to do this sort of thing on eBay anymore because that site has simply become too popular, but perhaps this site is new enough that such opportunities can still be found. Or so I thought.
Was I ever prescient. Turns out it is a sleazy ripoff site that charges 60 cents per bid, whether or not the bid wins. Worse, you have to buy a ridiculously high number (100, $60 worth) of bids up-front before you can use the site. And the shit icing on the cake is that you have no choice of bid increments: you can only make pathetic, penny-ante bids at a fixed amount dictated by an algorithm on their site.
I know enough about how “baby bids” work on eBay when you make them (or rather, don’t work) to know that this makes the site a complete ripoff. How much do you want to guess what the odds are that once you give them your $60, you’ll find that mysteriously there are no items about to sell for a song like their ad shows? My guess is pretty darn near 100% odds.