The wages of SIN

For several weeks, German customers of Swoopo have been allowed to use their expended bids as credit against the purchase of the auctioned merchandise, calling it Swoopo It Now (or "SIN"). Today (or recently -- I do have a life and Swoopo doesn't seem to send out press releases), they extended that courtesy to American bidders as well.


Of course, the merchandise is sold at MSRP, but if you lose big, you can salve your wounds a bit by buying the item for a not-terrible price. Say you blow 100 bids in a failed attempt to get that flatscreen TV -- Swoopo will give you $60 (100 bids at 60¢ each) off list if you buy it outright (and spot-checking a few items against Amazon suggests that Swoopo "list" is a pretty reasonable price).

Several issues:

1. There's a tight time-limit: you only have an hour to redeem the bids
2. You can do it while the auction is running -- but then you automatically lose.
3. Free bids are excluded, of course.
4. It isn't clear from the terms whether bids you buy at auction are valid: "vouchers" are excluded and auctioned bid packs are sometimes, but not always, referred to as "vouchers" on the site.

It's my analysis that SIN will drive up the price level. A bidder who has already expended more bids than the difference between "list" and what the product is worth to him has no incentive to stop bidding, since every 60¢ bid saves him 60¢ on the purchase if he doesn't win, and he might win.

Of course, that assumes that there are a lot of bidders out there who think like I do. We'll see.