Bidcactus and The Squirrel

As many are aware, I've been extensively covering the birth of The Auction Squirrel over the past few weeks in an attempt to provide the community and myself with a better understanding of what it takes to start a new penny auction site. In many of these posts I've made some comment comparing The Squirrel to Bidcactus and yesterday I received some feedback from Bidcactus that I wanted to share.

At one point I said Bidcactus was "really good at being average while spending thousands per day on AdWords." Understandably, Bidcactus was not fond of this comment and I wanted to explain what I meant because I feed the context is not all that clear as I reread my own post.

What I meant to say is that Bidcactus is really good at being an average ecommerce site. They are, in my opinion, exceptional at being a penny auction site. If one compares Bidcactus to it's own industry, Bidcactus and Swoopo clearly shine. They have all of the details down and their sites are well functioning. However, when compared to ecommerce sites internet-wide, both Bidcactus and Swoopo are second tier. This is no strike against them, no one is expecting Bidcactus to compete with Amazon, eBay or Gilt on an aesthetics front. It takes a lot of resources to create such a site. This is all I was trying to say.

Criticizing Bidcactus for not looking like a top ecommerce site would be like criticizing Penny Auction Insider for not looking like Slate or the Huffington Post, which as a comment might hold some value for gaining perspective, but clearly does not compare the site to its relevant peers. I wouldn't take any offense if someone told me my site wasn't nearly as good as Slate, I'm not trying to compete with Slate, and I hope Bidcactus takes no offense when I point out that there are more sophisticated sites on the web.