Friday, July 24, 2009

Yottabid? More like Nottabid!

I always liked YottaBid. First of all, I liked the name. "Yotta" just means "eight", but because it is used in the metric system to mean 1024 (that is, 1000 to the eighth power, or for those of you bad at math, 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) it has come to mean "really big". I like really big, so I liked YottaBid.

Second, YottaBid is one of the few penny-auction sites with user forums. Now, I suspect that user forums are a bad, bad idea. They're an open invitation for bluffing ("I have loaded 1000 bids into the automatic bid-bot!"), collusion ("Bob, if you don't bid against me on this auction, I'll won't bid against you."), and other misbehavior.

But the fact that YottaBid is doing something that isn't in YottaBid's own best interest doesn't mean they're not fun to watch.

Until today (or recently -- again, I only noticed today). You go to their site and all there is is:
We currently have no auctions posted as we evaluate the type of format we will have in the future. Until then, please feel free to comment in our forum at this link, or email us at support@yottabid.com
Not good news. Either the message is the truth, and the YottaBid management is completely dazed by whatever is going on in their corporate life, which is bad; or the message is not the truth, and YottaBid management is just lying to us. Two bad choices.

2 comments:

  1. Yottabid has been down for almost a month, they gave too many items away--needed to change their format before they lost even more. What they did was change the policy end of June and allowed the "bid dominators" to come back and thus chased everyone who was waiting for their limits to be reached to be done so they could jump in & play and what really did it was a PS3 went for around $15 or so... :) -pennyauctionwatch.com

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  2. The forums worked very much to their detriment and many users warned them of this, too bad they didn't listen. Check out our post on this: http://pennyauctionwatch.com/2009/06/the-bid-to-win-psychological-bullying-strategy-to-winning-penny-auctions-2/

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