BigDeal

Bottom Line the website BigDeal.com is a scam! Short overview of my experience. Bid like crazy to the point that spent over 300 dollars on Buy Bids. I am so far in now better just opt for the BUy It now, which i do. Go through the buy it now process all seems fine. Check my bank account on line. Transactions show pending, I receive an e-mail from Chris, saying something wrong with my shipping address, I reply with another address, check my bank account again online transactions pending, few banters back and forth with Chris about shipping address eventually says my shipping address is ok, and he will let the shipping section know along with accounts. I m think cool paid too much for the product but ok my mistake check my online bank account transactions have gone through but now my account it not showing transaction for the buy it now part only for all the money spent on Buy Bids. Product not shipped over 300$ dollars spent on nothing. And to top it off no reply from Chris, no answer their telephones and no answer to complaints. Does any one have a suggestion as to what I legally can do to reclaim my money and hopefully shut this site down!

NOT A SCAM IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING! YOU DONT EVEN HAVE TO WIN TO WIN:

I need to get a big screen TV and an xbox for my apartment. Big Deal has a 50" plasma in its rewards section for $237 dollars off so all I have to do is buy $237 worth of bids use them (win or lose) on the xbox and I essentially get the TV and xbox for the retail price of the TV. But with $237 in bids and a little common sense I really can't lose. Ill report back when I do it.

Waste of time and potentially a lot of YOUR $$

Do not use this site unless you are absolutely willing to pay full price for the item you are bidding on! Otherwise you will lose money. AFTER you do not "win" the item, the site claims you can use your "loyalty bucks" to save money shopping on items, but don't forget you paid for those "loyalty bucks" in REAL money.

Seriously do not get sucked in and think your gonna nab a deal. You are bidding against other people who actually think they are gonna get a deal too. Greed in contagious! Like I said, only use the site if you actually going to pay full price. You can use your bid money toward the item. This means the money you spent on tokens is actually going to the full price of the item, thus, you will not lose money, just pay for the darn thing with Buy it Now if you don't win. Remember tokens cost. 75 cents so don't buy more than the item is worth!

Read Read READ the rules of the site. (genius business plan for BigDeal) They are making a ton of money on other peoples desire to get one deal. Remember if it seems to good to be true, it usually is!

This review will be short, sweet, and honest. DO NOT WASTE YOU TIME, MONEY AND HOPE with this website. It's owners are a bunch of cyber thugs out to legally but dishonestly get your money. It's totally an internal conspiracy and not anything close to an honest bidding process. In addition, your computer equipment will be totally infected with malicious Malware and Adware, and you will face the music trying to clean up the mess. I tried it, got nothing but Trojan horses in my computer. It's your choice, but consider this a stern and honest warning which will undoubtedly save you money, time, and your computer

After carefully reviewing this site, I have determined that they are not actually an auction site. They actually distribute the cost of products across all users, and unequally to their higher users. The method they do this by is hidden. Each user actually pays 75 cents per bid. The bid increments the bidding price by 15 cents. Following that for each 15 cents of an items price, the company nets 50 cents. That is a 75% markup if you count the product as the bid. So for an item that costs $50, a total of ~333 bids are committed, which is also ~$166 for the company. Although the cost is distributed among each user, it is not unreasonable to extrapolate that any user is going to end up loosing hundreds if not thousands of dollars to this company.

They do allow the loosing bidders to buy the product at the price that they set. Usually they only mark up the price by ~30% over prices listed on Google Shopping. You also get a $1 of discount points for redemption in their gift card section.

Example: Lenovo G550 15.6" Laptop reward. Cost by Bigdeal.com: $599, discounted to $449. Google Shopping price: depending on options(i. E. ram) $339 - $469.

Overall I have to say they have a wonderful business model, but any consumer is going to end up pay much more overall then they would just shopping for the product. The big difference is the cost is going to be distributed over several bidding experiences.

In addition to the observations made by the previous poster, auctions for hot items such as an iPod Touch 64GB are being controlled by BOT's. These BOT's are either product of individuals or the site itself, either way you have to purchase a large number of "Bids" in an effort to defeat the BOT.

I suspect the site itself of running the BOT's, if you look at past winners the same names (one's I recognize from watching the auctions and seeing the BOT's in action) keep coming up and the number of "Bids" that these BOT's dump into the auction to win them is always high.

No matter what tactic you take when bidding on auctions on this site the average person will never come out on top.

The site really does sell the items you are bidding on so from that perspective it is not a scam. It also really does offer 10% discount on gift cards for Amazon, walmart so you can get 'some' of your $$ back. The site works by keeping each auction open (recycling 30 secs) whenver anyone puts another bid in. It gets you to 'gamble' and and even bid on auctions for that sell their bid tokens - each time you click, it costs you. 75cents and the bid only goes up by. 01 cents. Yes, it sounds cool right, one cent auctions (but remember you paid. 75 cents for each 1 cent bid) -- Put that into perspective of someone bidding 146 times (multiply by. 75 - $109) on something that is worth $179 and it sounds pretty good right? But now add up all the other people (and all the other auctions you lost) all the auctions you bid 111 etc times and stopped because someone else was still clicking each 15 secs left. You then understand why their business model works for their company -- they are making a fortune. The analogy of Vegas is a good one - have fun and know what you are getting into this for. Gambling
I did buy minor things that nobody wanted (video games) as well as three sets of 50 bid tokens and have now cancelled my account. Since I am not a gambler and more of a logistics person (I love ebay) this site is not for me at all. This is a gambling website.

DO NOT FALL FOR IT! SEVERAL of the auctions I bid on ended "suddenly" and I lost the item, and all my money I used to buy bids, on which I used. The loyalty Bucks is a whole other joke! You do get dollar for dollar for the money you spend on bids, but you have a limited number of items you can buy with them, and to boot, YOU CAN ONLY USE 25% of the items' price, in loyalty bucks. So you will still have to pay out of pocket, and still have to give this company more of your hard earned cash.

Go to the casino. Play roulette. Put $100 on red. Wait for the spin, and see if you won. You have a better chance of winning at the casino than you do at this place. There are bots everywhere on this site. You will not beat them. Maybe 1 out of 20 people will win something just to keep people coming back (kind of like at the casinos). This is just gambling, the creators of the site are laughing all the way to the bank. Sure you can end up buying the product for MSRP, which is often more than you'd pay on Amazon. Don't think you will get that iPad for $100, it's more probable that you win it at a raffle. It's easy to get carried away, especially if you aren't very smart (and/or bad at probability and statistics). There are a lot of stupid people in the world which help sites like this exist. You have a better chance of getting the inheritance from a Nigerian prince than you do at winning a product with the website. So just contact the first advanced fee wire fraud Nigerian scammer, and he can help you out. AVOID THE WEBSITE.

I wonder if all the people claiming scam are doing so simply because they did not happen to win their bids... sure, you are taking a chance when bidding on anything, but that does not make it a scam. They do not guarantee you will win and they give you the chance to apply the money you bid against the retail purchase of the item so worse case you take a chance, lose the bid and buy it at retail. Then they also give you loyalty bucks for the full amount you have spent on bids to apply toward other purchases to get some great deals.

I'm curious, too, how many Las Vegas losers scream fraud at the casinos (a highly regulated industry). It is a gamble, but there are winners.

I just found this site a week ago and so far have won bids on a DSi game for $5 (retail $30), wine aerators for $6 (retail $50), an Xbox 360 for $60 (retail at $300) AND an iPad retailed at $819 for only $250 (all of these include the the cost of bids placed)! These are all items I was in the market for and would have spent $1200 retail for and I got them for under $350 (and I still have bid tokens left).

If I don't receive the items in 2 weeks as promised I will be back with a "shame on me" post... but for now I am a FAN of bigdeal.com.

They claim its as easy as 1, 2, 3 yes to LOOSE your money, it took me about $10 to figure it out how it worked since it wasnt made easy to understand and figure it out. This site is a scam do not register or buy bids. This is site in no way an auction, when you buy bids and place bids you LOOSE the money even though you didnt win, for example on ebay you bid if your the highest bidder you pay and you get the item but you don't PAY for each time you bid, here you pay 75 cents for each bid meaning each time you bid you kiss your 75 cents good bye.

The website is fair and does an adequate job of explaining the process. Penny auctions have been around for ages in the form of actual events which participators pay a flat rate to enter, or an internet based website in which participants opt to pay up front for their bids. I feel that most of the negative comments come from people who simply do not understand the purpose or mechanism behind this wonderful idea. I can say from personal experience that if one does not spend their bids wisely, they may want to opt for an auction which has a "Buy It Now" price, so those bids can be later applied to the principle price in the event of a loss in the auction. If you lost money with the site, thats probably your own fault for gambling with your money and not adequate researching the risk. I bought a computer for the full retail price listed ($299.99) when my bidding went too high, another time I got a BlueRay Nightmare Before Christmas DVD for just $0.85, and my friend got a new 16GB Nano iPod for under $5.

As of right now, for the money I spent on their site, I have gained more in merchandise value; and therefore am in the positive. However, if I were to attempt an auction tomorrow and spend a high amount of bids and not win the item, I would quickly be in the negative. So as of now, I have a positive review, I have used the website well and have gained merchandise at a great value as a result. If the opposite had happened and I was a sore looser, I would probably be complaining with the rest of the people on this forum. To you I say this, Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware.

Hey, you guys really need to do your homework before you start calling bigdeal a scam. It's a penny auction site, if you're not familiar with penny auctions I would suggest you take a look at the forum at http://www.pennyauctionwatch.com there are tons of sites like bigdeal but I think bigdeal is one of the honest ones out there, they let you apply your full bids to buying the item. What's unfair about that? And their prices are competitive with current market prices on most items, do your research, check Amazon first before you bid and be prepared to pay retail if you don't want to lose $30 here and there. I have won items on there, an iMac in the beginning for $300, an iPod for $30, plasma tv for around $50+shipping, or so then there are times where I've had to pay retail on items, some that I didn't really want but I did anyway just to not lose my money because I started bidding and bid a lot. So yeah, check out this article http://www.pennyauctionwatch.com/2010/04/bigdeal-auction-competitive-shopping-reviews/

And post a review there and get educated about penny auctions before you call them all scams, the ones that need to be called scams are the ones that are really scamming with their bots and shills. Bigdeal.com says they have capital and they know what they're doing, they even let you have minimal risk, a lot of other penny auction sites won't do that, you'll walk away with nothing if you don't win & only one can be a winner.

The real scammers need to get shut down, IMO bigdeal.com isn't a scam.

Yes, BigDeal is no more than Big Scam! It's true that items worth hundreds of dollars can be sold there for a fraction of their retail value, but this is not as good as it may sound.

First, you have to buy a number of what they call "bid tokens", in order for you to bid. Each token represents one bid increment when used. They sell 50 tokens for $37.50 (i. E. $0.75 per token).

Below are some of the paid prices for some of the recently ended items on that site, so you can have a better idea of what is *really* going on there.

- 16GB USB Flash Drive, retail price= $29.99 sold there for $11.15 Since bidding increment is only 1c, this means that the $11.15 that was paid is actually 1115 (which is the number of bids)x$0.75(which is the actual value of each bid)=$836.25!

- A $100 VISA gift card (value = $100) was sold there for $22.55. Lucky is the winner of course, however, the $22.55 is actually 2255 bids x $0.75(the value of each bid)= $1691. 25!

- 30 of their own bid tokens (value of $22.50) was sold for $15.59, which is 1559bids x $0.75=$1169. 25!

I wonder if filing a dispute with PayPal or the credit card company would work. Has any one tried to dispute?

I just reserved an iPad 2 and I was just searching for iPad related things and this site popped up. I sat there watching an auction, realizing that these people were spending. 75$ for every bid and my head was spinning! I don't want to say people are stupid but COME ON! I almost registered on the site just out of curiosity to see what was going on but thought twice about that. This is crazy! People will do anything for a deal! A deal that isn't a deal! Seriously, if it sounds to good to be true, it IS TO GOOD TO BE TRUE! Go buy it at the store, where you have a reciept and a guarantee it's real. In the case of iPad2, it just came out! Who are these people that think they can get a sold out product for less than retail a week after its released? Like I said, go to the store and buy it, if you can't afford it save a few bucks a week until you can. I'm not trying to be mean to anyone. I truly feel for all of the people that were ripped off by this site but it's high time we all stop falling for this crap. Just because you saw it on TV (or in this case; online) doesn't mean it's true or legit.

Well, I was thinking of trying the site as it looked like it was a win win proposition. If I don't win I don't lose any money because I can still buy the product with my bid money counting toward the retail price. However because I am fairly poor I decided to watch a few auctions before putting my money in. This is what I saw. Granted this is only one auction that I watched but it put a sour taste in my mouth.

I watched an apple IPad auction. It was a buy it now not available auction. The auction was a penny auction that eventually ended at $94.69. The only problem was that the winner used 2651 bids. This means that this winner bought an I pad that retails for $829.00 (at the apple store) for $2,050.58. I am fairly certain that this was a ringer upping the bids, Even if you take out the winner's bids bigdeal.com made 5113. 50 on this auction. I looked and this auction is not displayed when looking at "Previous Auctions". I have a screenshot if anyone wants it. Email me at *******@gmail.com

Also I wanted to call the business and ask them about this auction. I looked all over for a phone number on the website, but one was not to be found. I looked the company up on the BBB and the number they have is not answered. I am leary of a business I can't get a hold of.

To be completely fair I did see an auction for an ipod touch go for less than $80. Including the buyer's price to bid.

I have bid on a number of penny auction sites and I can tell you that BigDeal.com is one of the better ones. I have always gotten the items I've won in a timely manner.

If you are looking to score a $200 item for pennies then forget it - not that it's impossible (I've won a Kindle valued at $259 for only $58.55) but don't count on it. Winning takes time and patience.

There are three types of bidders in my view: 1 those that think they will win with 3 or 4 bids and leave disappointed and feeling cheated; 2 - those that were planing to buy the item from the store and figured they would take a chance and try to win it at a discount and 3 those that know what they are doing and plan to sell the item later for something they really wanted to buy. Each auction has a mix of all these types and the ones who only placed a few bids hoping to strike it rich leave disappointed.

As to how much money BigDeal is making; one has to figure in that almost every item has a buy-it-now option and only BigDeal knows how many people are taking advantage of it (I use it all the time when I lose an auction). With a buy-it-now option one can't count the bid price and multiply it by. 75 to figure out the profit margins (the 300 bids I place on an auction will go towards the buy-it-now option).

I will admit that as more people discover the fun and excitement of BigDeal.com the more crowded the auctions are becoming making it harder to win but not impossible.

I have also taken advantage of their rewards program to buy gift cards at a 10% discount. I will combine a 10% Macy's gift card with a Macy's promotional discount to save big (it was even better when BigDeal was selling Macy's gift cards with a 25% savings... if you are reading this BigDeal please bring back the Macy's cards that were $75 for $100 card!).

In summary: BigDeal is legit (I have gotten every item I won or bought); I have won things at deep discounts so I seriously doubt that they are using bots. I will continue to bid with BigDeal.com.

Bigdeal... IS LEGALIZED GAMBLING IN AN AUCTION FORMAT... uses a LOTTERY business model

EXAMPLE: An IPAD WINNING AUCTION PRICE OF $ 109.38 FOR THE WINNER.

1) thats 10,938 bids at $. 75 a bid. BIGDEAL just sold an $899 item for... $ 8,203.50. This is the rule not the exception

2) 25 bids were made by the winner so add $18.75 to $109.38 for $128.13 winning price of $111.08 or 86% off retail.

3) for every winner there are hundreds if not more losers. (those that made the other 10,913 bids)

4) Sure, the winner got a great deal, but everybody else loses and needs to realize they are gambling with their bids. Just like in Las Vegas the odds always in the HOUSES favor.

3) So if you understand that BIGDEAL is really a casino and you are the gambler, then you understand what you are up against. And everyone knows, ONLY GAMBLE WHAT YOU ARE PREPARED TO LOSE.

4) So if you like to gamble then this site is for you. If not, then stay away because you will fall into a downward spiral spending good money after bad.