Swoopo Review, best deal ever or another scam?
June 23, 2009 by srfto
Swoopo ads has been pouring all over Gossip Gamers through Googles ad program and I couldn’t help notice how convincing some of their offers were. PS3 for $42.60 sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me but how would that be possible? The trick is, Swoopo charges those who bid — a whole 75 cents each.
Three fourths of a dollar may seem like a paltry sum to get a $1,300 piece of hardware for a portion of the price, but those 75 cents add up rather quickly. Bidding on a single item fifteen times costs the bidder a total of $11.25. And from then on it just snowballs into larger and larger amounts.
The site does let you know very clearly that bidding incurs this charge. Each auction page tells the bidder the 75 cent surcharge, the amount each bid raises the price, as well as the time the auction has left.
It seems squeaky clean at first glance — the 75 cent charge isn’t even that bad — but the bid increments, time system, and even the “BidButler” program that automatically bids are all set up in a way that the site makes a huge amount of profit on those who do not win the auctions.
The majority of bidding increments are 15 cents, though some “specials” are penny auctions which go up extremely slowly. But the point of only allowing users to bid 15 cents or a penny at a time is to rake in as many bets as possible.
Of course anyone is willing to pay $42.60 dollars for a Playstation 3 but the auctions start at tiny sums to get more bids in. Working up from $5 or $15 all the way up to just $150 takes over a hundred bets, each one of each costing the bidders 75 cents.
Also, many bids actually raise the auction time up to a maximum of 20 seconds each. More times than not, when a bid reaches down to the first ten seconds anyone looking to get the item bids and the time frame jumps back up in accordance to demand. Anyone not using the “BidButler” program might as well not bid with this type of system.
BidButler only bids up the maximum amount of times and amount the user sets, but if a maximum bid ratio is not set it will bid each time it is upped until it reaches the maximum. And those using the program all jump in within the last seconds of the auction, forcing the time up from seconds to minutes.
Let’s say the auction for the PS3 started at 1 cent, using the penny auction system, it would require 4,260 bids to end the auction at $42.60. Again, Swoop charges $.75 each bid — 4,260 X $.75 leading Swoopo to have already earned $3,195 from the community of bidders for the sale of the PS3. That’s the biggest profit anyone can make off a sale on a PS3.
To that one lucky winner however, $42.60 is a huge bargain, but your odds are unlikely unless you’ve bidded an insane amount of times. The retail cost of a PS3 is $399.99, allowing you to bid about 500 times before, if you can win the auction within 500 bids, you may have broken even.
Swoopo is not a site for the frugal or the inattentive. Those looking for a deal on something extremely expensive can save a bundle of money as long as they set their values right on BidButler, or do it on their own and watch it like a hawk for hours to see when the automatic bidders have given up.
Many users have claimed there are many different strategies that can help you win and gain a profit. Although this may be true, their business model however nothing more than an online casino/lottery masking an an auction site.
Anyone looking to save a few dollars should look elsewhere. Chances are the charges for bidding will accumulate to a price point close to the original value, and that sort of negates the point.
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The odds of winning on Swoopo are super slim considering all of the users on there seriously check out pennyauctionwatch.com for reviews and a directory of similar auctions.
This is all you need to know. Sure, if you are unemployed or a housewife with all your kids raised and nothing else to do, you might find the guides to Swoopo on Squid tempting to read up on and master your Swoopo auction skills. But for most of us who are in those middle-income brackets or even on a fixed income and have active lifes, let me give you the low down. Please read on. This is what I wrote on the BBB, though they are usually paid-off to only show positive reviews.
Swoopo?? I think the proper name is Stoopo, because I felt pretty stupid after running after the little carrot they wiggled in front of me. Only a few days later, I was able to put two and two together with figuring out this company. Their business plan, in terms of ethics and morals, is very improper, but amazingly brilliant in finding a loop hole in the law for LEGAL online scams.
It’s almost like gambling. You might end up with a real bargain the first couple times you play, but the more you use it, you’ll only find that you broke even … or below even. You have to purchase bids in order to bid. In fact, you can bid on winning more bids … then you simply purchase the bids you won!!! The auction clock, at any random time, can decide to increase its time from less then 10 seconds away from finish to over an hour away … and this can happen at multiple random times on the same auction item. So though it might show it running at a set timeframe when the auction begins, you can usually expect it to continue on about 2-10 times longer. Swoopo also use this system called a Bid Butler, that will continue to place bids for you as the high bidder when the clock goes under 10 seconds. They use a macro system for this, so you can be away from your computer while the “butler” kindly uses up your bids (which means your money) that you place on the butler. But if another person activates a butler (or if one is computer-generated by the company), then yours and theirs simultaneously bids until your butler or theirs run out of bids. In addition, the auctions are international for nearly all items. So with this economy, who do you think will have a better chance of winning? The American or the Icelander, both who have similar jobs, brings home the same amount of pay (even after Icelandic taxes)? My guess would be the Icelander. Moreover, Stoopo reserves the right to substitute whatever you won (at any time before its delivery) with another similar item of a LESSER VALUE compare to what you have won. It says so in their policy on their website.
After watching an auction on a 300 Bid Certificate (which basically will add 300 additional bids to your account), worth $180.00 (what Swoopo lists it as), I saw that a Bid Butler was activated by a username. I kept going back to the auction, as I was surprised how much money people where bidding on it, as the item was only worth $180.00. The butler didn’t win it, but the person going against it with single bids won it at close to $160.00. Now where is the deal with that? These 300 Bid Certificates are plentiful and always listed about 1 every hour or so. While this auction was going, there was another auction going for the same item and another just starting. The butler who was betting against everyone must of had at least 200 bids placed on it (the bids go up in 2 cent, 6 cent, 12 cent, and 24 cent increments, depending on the item … this item was set at a 2 cent increment), and that’s a conservative guess. My thinking is this … I feel that Swoopo sets up their own Bid Butlers and does this randomly to any particular product .. whether it’s on a Bid Certificate to head phones to a laptop to the plasma TV. It’s done randomly with a set number of unknown bids placed on each .. my guess is that it can go up to as much as 500 or more bids. Proof is in what you see and using a little common sense. Too bad in my case hind sight was 20/20.
Swoopo makes a lot of money off their legal scam. Say a 50 inch plasma TV MSRP is listed at 2 grand. I’ll lay this out at conservative estimates, but I do believe the profit margin on their auctions is much higher. Lets say one auction runs for nearly 15 hours and in that time about 200 people bid an average of 25 times each on the TV. Each bid is worth 0.60 cents for each $1.00 you pay. So by the time the person wins the TV, everyone spent a combined total of $3,000. Let’s say that on this auction, by chance, not one company computer-generated Bid Butler was assigned to it. A bidder wins at $150.00 and shelled out 15 bucks in purchased bids for it. Great day for them! Swoopo makes $3150, minus their cost for the overstock TV, and they come off with a loss (possibly). But take for example another auction with the TV and maybe 4 company computer-generated Bid Butlers assigned to it at random times during those 15 hours. It’s more competitive now, and the quantity of bets are increased to 50 averaged bets per actual person up to 200 bidders. The TV sells for $770.00. The winner ends up spending $30.00 in bets towards their win. Still a bargain for the winner. The total dollar amount spend by bidders on that auction came to $6000, and combined with the selling price, Swoopo makes a total of $6770 minus their cost. Now you have 2 winners.
Unlike eBay, Swoopo does not reveal who is putting up their items for auction. Even at an auction house, you get to read who is putting up the item, even if it’s from “anonymous”. In the case of Stoopo auctions, you only know what you see, and all purchases are final. With eBay, the seller pays to have their items listed for auction … and so it goes at any auction, usually. But with Stoopo, they work it the opposite way, otherwise known as a “reversed auction”, so they get these overstock items at killer prices from their suppliers. Would you pay $20 bucks for the Sunday paper because all the advertisers got to advertise at rock-bottom prices while the true expenses are passed off onto their consumer base? There just seems something wrong with that idea.
Hello, my name is Montana and I work for Swoopo.com. We appreciate your post.
I can assure you that Swoopo.com is not a scam. We have real winners, real bidders, and real savings.
When you first register for Swoopo.com and haven’t won an auction, there will be a beginners auction section to our site. I suggest you start there. It will give you an idea on how our site works. There is also a wonderful help menu to help guide you through Swoopo.com.
After you get the feel of it, come up with a strategy that works for you.
Thank you. I hope all is well and happy bidding.
Best,
Montana
“Hello, my name is Montana and I work for Swoopo.com. We appreciate your post.
I can assure you that Swoopo.com is not a scam. We have real winners, real bidders, and real savings.
When you first register for Swoopo.com and haven’t won an auction, there will be a beginners auction section to our site. I suggest you start there. It will give you an idea on how our site works. There is also a wonderful help menu to help guide you through Swoopo.com.
After you get the feel of it, come up with a strategy that works for you.
Thank you. I hope all is well and happy bidding.
Best,
”
Montana
/\ /\ /\ /\ /\
Yeah, well I’m sure Bernie Madoff’s secretary thought just as highly about him and his company until the day the Feds raided his building in New York. The broad was kept in the dark for years … and unfortunately, so are all Swoopo employees who think highly about Swoopo.
The truth will come out eventually. Like another poster says, there isn’t internal quality control going on at Swoopo. You know what happens when I leave the house with food on the table? The dog gets to it. Because I am quality control, but I left the house, so there is no internal quality management during that time. And my dog … well, she’s a dog. Another analogy … put cheese in front of the mouse, he’s going to grab it. Same with a carrot and a rabbit. There is no way in hell that all the Execs and Admin people with Swoopo are wearng halos. Even the pope is prone to sin. So your Swoopo people aren’t better. There is no one to enforce accountability … especially with only 50 employees total for 3 business locations in 3 different countries. Without that accountability and a large quality control department, you guys are open to so many problems.
I find your 2 cents to be very cheap but at the same priceless.The members of the Gambinos and other crime families all held “day jobs”.They paid some form of taxes,gave back to communities they lived in,their wives went too get their hair and nails done before a business party,kids attended school with other children………I assume you would call them legitimate people too!
Hi, as you posted the penny bids would yield a profit of just over 3k, however were the advertisement a 15cent auction, as i see on their site, they would yield a profit of 213$, plus the 42$ plus the shipping.
so they are selling the product for less then the MRSP, how do they make their money?
Probably because if it is a 15 cent one, the prices go far higher, they also get wholesale prices, so take off about 5-10%
HA HA HA. I killed that vampire!
I think the business model is ingenious. However, I would not participate for a good number of reasons.
Being that the Business itself is making money off the bids, I would feel there would be less likelihood for any internal monitoring system from preventing a self-outbidding scheme from taking place.
Lets look at it this way.
Swoopo puts up a hot item… lets say a 50″ Plasma TV. Bidding opens up at $1.00 with a half hour bidding time.
It gets a few bids and by the time it reaches a 5-Minute marker it is still priced rather low at lets say $27.00.
Now is where the “Fun” begins. With time breaking 5-Minute marker, the bidders watching the auctions are getting more tempted to closely watch the item to try to “pick” their moment, hoping no one else is going to bid.
By the time it breaks 1 Minute remainder time on auction, the 50″ Plasma is up to $50.00. If it was a $0.01 auction item, each bid was increasing the auction price by $0.01 / increasing seconds on item by 1-4 seconds (from what I witness watching an auction today). Each bid transaction comes at a cost of $0.60. For the item to have reached a price of $50.00, there would have been4,900 bids @ $0.60 a bid for a total item sale value of $2,940.00 for that 50″ Plasma. ($49.00 / $0.01 x $0.60 = $2,940.00) I doubt they paid retail value for that 50″ Plasma, so the percentage of Markup on the item sold even at $50.00 would be well over 100%.
That’s just the icing on the cake.
Now lets say Joe Blow was banking on getting himself a cheap Plasma and this looked like too sweet a deal to pass up. Joes been bidding since the minute marker and made a grand total of 30 bids (30 bids @ $0.60 = $18.00). Lets be honest, $18.00 isn’t that much money really, but if Joe doesn’t win the bid, he spent $18.00 on absolutely nothing. Compound that by the thousands and you really got a huge rip off scheme going.
And I am hardly finished. What Joe Blow doesn’t realize, along with the hundreds of other participating bidders, is that Swoopo stacked the decks! They’ve got auto-auction bidders who will continually outbid you on every item till the final tick of the clock. “10 seconds, 8 seconds, 5 second! What, Outbid by JohnnySpot2 yet again!!!… I’ll win this TV YET!”
As I said earlier, who is monitoring these auctions to ensure that this is not happening and how is someone to know they auctions are legit? Who is to say that Swoopo hasn’t set into place an auto-bidding program behind their website for every available auction, or that they aren’t hiring people on the side to bid on the items themselves, and paying them a percentage of the bottom line $$$ markups they are making off of items. Who is tracking the items sold to ensure there are actually items being delivered to “customers” as you might think of them.
I highly doubt there is any monitoring of a site in this nature, and I am willing to bet that there is a indecipherable user agreement the length of a full series of encyclopedias covering Swoopo’s A$$ for the legality of the business they are conducting.
If that penny auction 50″ Plasma went up to $200.00 on the final sale, Swoopo brought in an astronomical $11,940.00 for a set that would have retailed $1000.00 – $2000.00 in stores today.
If Swoopo is engaging in self bidding on auctions, and they do not actually let a real bidder/customer win an auction, that $11,940.00 would be ALL PROFIT, since in fact no item was sold or delivered to a “customer”/bidder. I don’t care how they may be doing it, but I would be very skeptical on the ethics of this business and would lean towards the angle that this may in fact be the very thing they are doing.
Someone ought to have the business investigated for fraud.
Good deal or not for an individual purchase, this is capitalistic mentality at it’s dirtiest.
Hey… SWOOPO… CUT ME IN!!! I’ll bid on your auctions for you all day for a measly 1% of your profits from the auctions I partake in, and laugh my A$$ off all the way to the bank just like you are doing.
Paul here,
Hello Bryan, Your right, I never thought about what could go on behind the scene.
I have been watching this game now for about 4 weeks, wasted 37 bucks, about 50 bids.
Here is why you can’t really win:
The The Bid Butler beats you ever time and every single bidder. You have no chance of winning.
If you use the “bid butler” your competition “bid butler” will outrun you like a “Roadrunner” as your competition butler beats you up in a fraction of seconds and the time could raise to many additional minutes, even hours.
Don’t forget, this is worldwide, if you think you beat them at 2 O’clock AM,
the Europeans just got up and beat you out of your good money.
Go ahead and play the lottery, you might have a better chance!
Here is why you can’t really win:
The The Bid Butler beats you ever time and every single bidder. You have no chance of winning.
If you use the “bid butler” your competition “bid butler” will outrun you like a “Roadrunner” as your competition butler beats you up in a fraction of seconds and the time could raise to many additional minutes, even hours.
Don’t forget, this is worldwide, if you think you beat them at 2 O’clock AM,
the Europeans just got up and beat you out of your good money.
Go ahead and play the lottery, you might have a better chance!
Thoughts:
1: Just stay away from Swoopo. Ebay is, generally, more honest and economical for most users.
2: You need three assets to win consistently: (1) deep pockets; (2) significant free time; (3) determination to win no matter the price.
3: The instances when someone wins a 50″ HDTV for $15 or some such generally come from experienced players, anticipating that other experienced (but more cautious) players are waiting ’til the bidding gets higher, plunging into early bidding with very large 100+ bid “bid butlers” and catching everyone else sleeping. Remember — all you need is for someone to slip up or zone out or have a computer malfunction for 10 seconds and you win.
4: Rare and high MSRP items tend to attract bidding wars. Rare and low MSRP items tend to result in bidding wars. Only common/frequent items tend not to attract bidding wars and lend to a fair or better-than-fair price for the winner.
You hit it right on the head dood.It for,just like you said,people set upp to bid continually at what ever cost.Its a complete and utter waste of time and money for the average user!!!!!!!!
Sites like swoopo are more for fun than for people actually looking for a bargain. I suggest you look around at the other auction sites similar to swoopo. Bidfire.com is a new one that I’ve been playing on and I’ve actually won a couple things. Amazon gift cards going for $.10 (2 bids!) and a nintendo wii going for $3.30 is ridiculous. Before you completely discount the idea, you should check them out.
their bots make sure that none of the products is sold to a real customer before the total amount earned by swoopo has reached several times its retail price.
I was suspecting the same thing. I created an application that monitors the activity of the bids and collects historical information. It appears to be the same couple of “users” are winning the majority of the auctions.
Sites like Swoopo are more for fun than for people actually looking for a bargain. I suggest you look around at the other auction sites similar to Swoopo. Hasteno.com is a new one that I’ve been playing on and I’ve actually won a couple things. Playstation 3 games going for $.08 (2 bids!) and a Nintendo Wii going for $2.16 is ridiculous. Before you completely discount the idea, you should check them out.
anybody pick up that Thomas and DougM’s comments are identical just plugging other sites? hilarious! scam all the way. don’t do it!
I used swoopo but they were SO expencive. Did some research this is the cheapest, lowest priced penny bid acution site there is!
http://muulu.com there alot better 50 cents per bid, and with all the discounts on your second bid package it’s more like 30 cents per bid. Swoopo is a dinosaur, and not in a good way.
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The site is basically overrun with folks bidding like crazy (basically businessmen)and cashing in on their savings by reselling the wins at huge profits.You mihgt get lucky and win an auction but for the most part,its designed too get people too loose money and make lots of money for those who have the time and cash too invest,alot like the stock market.Don’t waste your time trying too get those great deals simply bcuz they are few and far bewteen for the average user looking too save a nice chink of change.I’m sorry I fell for their hook but you can learn from my mistakes by not making the same one!!!
I Paid for the credits just to analize SWOOPO and this is what I found. For 7 days now and going from auction listing to auction listing it is a scam. I watched the bids and the names and I noticed that every auction as the exact names bidding except for yourself and probably 3 other people. If you go into an auction write down the bidders names and as you go into the next auction write the bidders names and compare. So it seems to me SWOOPO has its own bidders to raise the prices up until the figure its enough to let you win. And to be point blank I have seen auctions at 1 second and 7 seconds later its back at 15 so that means the person who was about to win that auction worked for SWOOPO and that is unlawful. So If you want to waste you money then go ahead. But if you investigate like me your see that there is no way around getting scammed from this company.
Yah I tried bid butler to to see what happens. I bidded $12-$25.00 with 19 bids. Guess what happened? My bids where placed under $16.00 and the auction paused for a moment at $16.00 and then said Auction ended ____ IS THE WINNER AT $16.06. So what happened to my bid of $25.00 you tell me. Figure it out SWOOPO gets the auction and places the item back up for auction thats the catch. We need real people with tracking numbers to actually see that the products are being delivered after the auction ends. Do we have any volunteers? We will much appreciate this.
Just repeat after me. If sounds too good to be true, it probably is a scam. I thought this site looked interesting and a good concept, however if it is rampant with auto bots, then count me out. You cannot beat a computer in a bidding war.
They are a smart bunch over there though. Last night they changed the bid increment on some items from 6 cents down to 2 cents. People checking the ended auctions will see that a certain item sold for X dollars so assume that thats the norm except that now it takes 3 times as long and 3 times as many bids to get there.
do not go on swoopo you will just get riped off its a shit web site
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