Zbiddy

Not a real fan of penny auction sites. Seems they work great for some, not for most. In my experience, I fared very well with the $100 airfare travel cheques, $100-200 hotel cash cards and two-for-one companion airfare vouchers. OR SO I THOUGHT!

I happily paid for my deals, went to redeem them and realized why they were so easy to win. There's like a million different black-out dates, restrictions and time restraints. For air travel, your initial ticket has to be over $350 and your trip must include an overnight stay on a Saturday. For hotel discounts, you have to book at least 4 consecutive nights.

Now, I'm on a budget and don't travel often. When I do, it's not for long periods of time. I try to get the best deals on airfare and I certainly try to avoid the most expensive nights to stay in a hotel. I thought winning these vouchers would be a great way to do so.

It was a complete waste of my time and money bidding on these. What a bummer!

Well run site, few large items and always the same, a bunch of travel, cruise, vacation items All with restrictions or sending you to a travel agency to up sell you. No use as you can not simple use as you wish. Even cash wins for travel has restrictions. Very poor selections over all that again don't change. I have won bids only to find restriction I can not use on other then household items. Once again, you will see the same items all the time. I think they are missing an opportunity and happy for you to buy bids on useless items. It takes the fun out of this experience but I'm told all the sites are the same way

Lousy selection of items, so the few decent items they do have; run forever. I have been watching for a month for a few specific items (a dyson vacuum, a laptop, etc.) I had the day(s) memorized for when these items would be available to be sold. For instance, I knew that today at 1PM one of my items would be at the final countdown and ready to be finally sold. I was shocked when I went to my "Watch List" (a month old, mind you) and saw that all of these items had another (at least) 2 weeks tacked on to them. Fraud? I think so. This isn't a good sign for this site. I'm spending my remaining bids and getting out while the "going's good".

Bid and won numerous restaurant.com gift vouchers. Took a lengthy period of time to get the vouchers issued (as a matter of fact,... I'm still waiting on a $50 one,... been waiting nearly 6 weeks). I've redeemed all the other vouchers and enjoyed the restaurants. I recently tried to get the name of CEO or head of Customer Care & an address of the company but got the run around by the chat line representative (Nancy). She did finally give me the mailing address but wouldn't give me the name of anyone at the company that I could address my letter of concern to. Things that make you go Hmmmmm!

It's not the site... it's the people using it. I do agree their sign-up practices are deceiving, however the issue is with the number of people using the site. They make their money through the charges on bids. At $. 10+ per bid for an Apple Ipad that sells for $350.00 the person winning gets a deal, but the company has accumulated ******* bides at $. 10+ per bid, that's $3500. 00 for the item. Even if they pay list... they pocket almost 3 grand. Not bad, whoever thought of this and got people to participate in it is a genius.

I Was looking at a few review sites and they pretty much all say "zbiddy.com" is bad!

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/zbiddy.com
https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/zbiddy.com
https://safeweb.norton.com/reviews?url=zbiddy.com

Accusations of spamming and worse!

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Then add this to consider:

BBB Business Review: Rated a D-

This Business is not BBB accredited
ZBiddy.com Online Auction
Additional Locations

Factors that lowered the rating for ZBiddy.com Online Auction include:

Length of time business has been operating
167 complaints filed against business
Length of time business has taken to resolve complaint(s)
Business has failed to resolve underlying cause(s) of a pattern of complaints

Phone: *******390
434 S. Military Trail, Deerfield Bch, FL *******

*******@zbiddy.com
View Additional Email Addresses http://www.zbiddy.com

BBB Rating: D-
On a scale of A+ to F

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167 complaints closed with BBB in last 3 years | 167 closed in last 12 months

Advertising/Sales Issues 17
Billing/Collection Issues 34
Delivery Issues 10
Guarantee/Warranty Issues 3
Problems with Product/Service 103

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Business Management
Mr. Darryl Fernandes, Director of Operations Mr. Seth Dillon

Contact Information
Principal: Mr. Darryl Fernandes, Director of Operations

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The Delaware address is not a physical location for this company. The Delaware address is a mail forwarding location. The company's website also provides the following address:
72 High St.
Haslemere, Surrey GU27 2LA

This address is located in the United Kingdom.

On 12/12/12, the business emailed the BBB and indicated that "Zbiddy no longer has a location in the U.S."

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Sorry my recomendation is to stay away from this site!

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.