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Thomas H.

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186

1 Review by Thomas

  • Zbiddy

3/12/11

Bottom line: You can save a lot of money on individual items if you have the time and are willing to pay up to 60 cents for each bid even on those you lose.

Pros: If you are lucky enough to win the item you will pay much less than retail price.

Cons: Costs up to 60 cents for each bid and it might it could take a lot of bids to win. There's an upfront cost of $159 for 259 bids to start which isn't very clear when you start checking out the site. The selection is very limited. Since each bid in the last 10 seconds adds another 10 seconds or so it can take hours to complete a sale.

The company's method for making money is based on the number of bids. I watched an iPad go for about $87 which means it took 8700 bids at a penny each to get there. If all those bids were at the maximum cost of 60 cents that means the Zbiddy made about $5200 on bidding which more than covers the cost of a $500 iPad.
Bidding is very frustrating. There's no sense in bidding until the last 10 seconds which is when everyone gets involved. However, its really not the last 10 seconds since each bid adds more time. There seems to be two main strategies. One is to bid with about 10 seconds remaining and hope you're the last bidder and time runs out. The other one is to wait until the last second which allows you to wait to see if others will still bid without always wasting a bid. However, it adds about 10 more seconds and allows more time for someone else to bid. To help in bidding you can look at the history to see what the item has sold for in the past but it's often quite different based on how many people are on at the time. I've seen an iPad go for about $27 and up to $87 which is a difference of about 6000 bids. That's potentially a lot more bids you put in for yourself plus a lot of additional time considering every 10 seconds counts for about 3-8 bids on average.
When you buy bids they are 60 cents each. There are plenty of opportunities to buy bids as part of the auction. I did this once using 3 bids to buy 50 bids for 47 cents plus $1.99 processing fee. Buying this way got me more bids at about 5 cents each versus 60 cents. Another time I tried bidding on another 50 and it got to over $3 and I used about 12 bids before finally quitting. If you like Zbiddy though this is the only way to get more bids.
I think one of the keys to being successful is to bid at odd times when there are less people on. On weekends and evenings it just seems like the prices go up a lot higher. Another thing is to watch and see how many people are bidding. If action is pretty heavy just wait a while before you start wasting bids. You risk people just all of a sudden stopping the bidding but you won't waste as many bids. The site does provide a tool to bid for you when you're away but you have to have some idea what price it may go for. You can put in multiple prices for up to a total of 25 bids. I tried this but on a couple it never triggered because the price didn't get high enough and on another I wasted 10 bids because the price went a lot higher than what I predicted.
If you do waste a lot of bids the average cost of all the bids you've purchased can be applied against the retail price of the product. I bid on some Bose headphones and was getting frustrated so I just threw a bunch of bids on it and then bought them. This was when I decided I had enough of Zbiddy.
For those who like the challenge of winning and have the time to watch you can get great items at a much cheaper prices. However, you almost need to think of this more as a lottery. The more bids you put out there the higher odds you have but you're paying for each of those bids like paying for tickets in a lottery. Also, when you get an item don't forget the cost of your bids are part of your overall cost which Zbiddy does show you when bring up the item individually. Personally, I prefer eBay where there's an unlimited selection, you can predict a price, and when time runs out, time runs out.

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