Swoopo Promotion With a Twist

Swoopo sent me an email promotion on Friday night saying they would give me all my bids back on the first auction I won in the next 24 hours. The bids are refunded in the form of FreeBids and usable in the next seven days. It would be interesting if two people in this boat found themselves bidding against each other. I expect this would increase their willingness to expend bids to win the auction and this drive up the profit for Swoopo and the cost to the bidder(s) who doesn't win.

This concept does have its limits because people are only being refunded bids in the form of more bids and there is a limit to the amount of money anyone is willing to spend on bids. However, if Swoopo wanted to be truly diabolical they would refund the winner's spent bids in cash.

Imagine if two people who received this modified promotion found themselves bidding against each other. Each would expend ever larger amounts of money on bids, confident that eventually the money would be returned to them when they won the auction. However, as the auction progressed, each bidder would find himself desperate to win - having passed a point of no return in which they would see devastating losses if they failed to win the auction. The price of the auction item would easily go beyond MSRP with both bidders determined to win. The problem is that eventually someone must lose and when that happens one of the bidders will get out alive but the other will take a huge hit.

Swoopo isn't doing this though, and I'm glad they aren't. While a huge fan of free markets, self control and personal accountability, a system like this would be rigged to hurt people and penny auctions should be entertainment, not mechanisms of self destruction.
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Top 5 Funniest Penny Auction User Testimonials

5. "The Redneck"




4. "This is going to be my future Christmas wonder present"




3. "To go with my Wiiiiii"




2. "My daddy bought this guitar for 5 cents!"




1. "Serial Killer"




Honorable mention


"I'm doing this from my bathtub"


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In His Own Words: Swoopo CEO Explains How His Company Works

Swoopo CEO walks a reporter through how is site and his company work. Very cool, not a lot you probably didn't know already, but cool to hear it from the boss.
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Enterprising eBay Seller Sells Penny for $1

I found a penny for sale on eBay today with a Buy It Now price of $1. What's so special about this penny you ask? Well, it's a randomly selected, circulated coin with a face value of 1 cent - making it strikingly similar to many other pennies in the world. So what's the appeal? The seller claims this penny could be your lucky one! "Never quite found that "lucky" penny? Well let us find it for you!" You might scoff at the idea of selling a run of the mill penny for one dollar but I couldn't help but laugh at the sellers entrepreneurial spirit.

Only one of these "lucky" pennies has been sold but the seller (jerrys-stuff-shop) has more than 10 available in case you're thinking ahead to the Christmas season - makes a great gift in these hard economic times!
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Penny Auction Insider Now on Twitter

Follow us at twitter.com/pennyauctionguy
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Pposh Claims to be in Testing Mode, Questions Remain

I received lots of angry comments (almost certainly from Pposh employees) about my accusation that Pposh is a scam. People in the comments claim the site is still in testing mode and that users were sent an email saying so. I did receive such an email, posted below in its entirety.

"Salutations-

Thank you for signing up with Pposh.com. We are in the middle of testing the site. We do apologize for the inconvience but can you please come back in a few days. We will of course hold your bids and will send you an email as soon as it is ready.

Thank you for your patience and we look forward to seeing you soon!!

Pposh.com"

However, this alone does not clear the site from what I would call dubious practices if not from being an outright scam. First, nowhere on the site could I find a disclaimer saying it is still in testing mode - a huge problem. Pposh lists ended auctions with details about when they were won, who won and for how much. Pposh do you see any problem with posting over 170 ended auctions with full descriptions of the travel packages won with really low prices that were not actually won? That's false advertising if not illegal. Your blog has similar false advertising, which I took a screen shot of and posted here. If you are in testing mode why would you post on your blog "I just won a Caribbean cruise on a new website I just stumbled on and I feel they are going to be very successful ... they have just launched the site a few days ago. Check it out." So you didn't win a cruise 1. because you work at the site, 2. because there is no cruise because you are in "testing mode" and 3. you were OK with lying about this auction to potential customers.

Also, how can you claim to be giving away five "free" bids when you are in testing mode - obviously if I can't win anything because you are in testing mode you can't legitimately charge me for bids. I don't know if users can use bids they purchased at Pposh to bid on these "testing mode" auctions, but when I used all five of my "free" bids this morning I was prompted to select a bidpack and enter my credit card information (again, without ever being told I was bidding on "test" auctions). This is very, very wrong, if not, again, a huge SCAM.

Pposh, we will watch you closely when you claim to leave "testing mode" and see what is going on then. However, in an industry that already has a credibility problem you have dug yourselves a large hole with your lack of disclosure and misleading if not fraudulent information posted on the site. Everything about your site looks and feels like a fully operational penny auction site, if you are in testing mode you need to say so on the site. I really don't know why you would do live testing anyway, except in my honest opinion, to deceive potential bidders.

Pposh - I have not deleted your comments on the previous post and have no plans to do so. However, if this pattern of comments continues and you do not properly identify yourselves as Pposh employees or persons with a vested interest in the company I will delete them. I believe fully in transparency and user freedom of speech, however, if comments are deceptive in their own right than as the administrator of this site I have an obligation to filter them.

Penny Auction Insider community: Pposh has been extremely deceptive, I would avoid the site until it can be verified that they are legitimate. I am not the only one who feels this way, Penny Auction Watch had a similar story this morning. We will continue to follow this story but in the meantime, as Penny Auction Watch stated earlier today, anyone with $150 and a few spare hours can start a penny auction site and anyone with an internet connection can post a comment on this blog. We need to be careful before we spend money on any new penny auction site, unfortunately it's just too easy to defraud people online.

Even Swoopo, the largest and most credible site is getting destroyed by angry users on their Facebook page who claim to have won items and not received them or purchased bids and not received them. I think Swoopo is completely legitimate, but if even the best sites have glitches why would you trust a newcomer that is being deceptive before they even go live? If you have a Facebook account go here to read the comments on the Swoopo Facebook page, it's a mess.
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How Swoopo Alters Dopamine Levels in the Brain

Swoopo is addictive not because of sunk cost (as we have argued here) but because it impacts dopamine levels in the brain, says writer Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex, a science blog. Lehrer writes this fascinating article comparing the results of a scientific experiment - one where the impact of a reward on dopamine levels in monkey brains was tested under various circumstances - to Swoopo. In the study Lehrer describes, scientists found that monkeys responded to the expectation of a reward (apple juice) with an increased flow of dopamine to the brain, the same increase in dopamine as when the juice was actually received. However, once the monkeys became conditioned to expect the juice, their brains no longer responded with a dopamine spike, neither to the expectation nor to actually receiving the juice. The study concludes that neurons are concerned with expected rewards more so than actually receiving a reward. This applies to Swoopo, Lehrer writes, because bidders are kept in a state of perpetual expectation. Every time a user places a bid he becomes the high bidder and hopes/expects to win the item. According to the monkey experiment, this act causes dopamine levels to spike and since the reward is never guaranteed the brain is kept in a state of perpetual suspense, which stops the dopamine spike from diminishing over time. This spiking of the "happiness" chemical in the brain is what causes people to bid over and over and over again, says Lehrer.

Apart from being interesting, Lehrer's article adds legitimacy to Swoopo's claim that the site offers "entertainment shopping," for better or worse.
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