Madbid - don't do it

rayz_x

Madbid can sound appealing at first glance but of course, like anything that looks too good to be true, there are plenty of catches.

Before registering the site promises ‘Distributor wholesale, manufacturer stock, warehouse closeouts, overstock surplus’. Sounds promising?

Once you have registered it becomes clear that they only sell about 20 things a day by auction. I had expected something like e-bay with a wide choice of things sold at reasonable prices. (Gullible I know). The auctions all seem to say ‘this is an international auction’, so you are competing against the whole of Europe, possibly rest of the world, for whatever you are bidding for. It’s like the worst sale you ever went to.

The Madbid people seem keen to point out that it isn’t gambling. It may not be gambling by strict legal definition but there are plenty of similarities…

You can easily spend a lot of money and get nothing, each bid costs you at least 40p and you can put on hundreds of bids and ‘win’ nothing, remember each bid only raises the price by 1p. This means that for something a bidder buysfor £5.00 there have been £200 of bids placed. Most punters get nothing but spend a lot.

The odds of success are very small. With such a large pool of users it takes a lot of persistence and some luck to get anything. Bids start at 1 minute intervals, the countdown starting each time a bid is placed, so it can take an hour to get to £1.00. Most of us have the patience to wait an hour or two to get an expensive Mac or £3000 Canon camera for less than £10.00. How many hours would you watch for? Even when the bid interval gets to 10 seconds there can be a lot of people bidding still.

There is some skill and logic to the bidding. It makes no sense at all to bid if there area large number of others doing so at the same time. You may as well watch them spend 40p a time pushing up the price for a while. When it comes down to just two bidders you need to watch closely because if one of them drops out the other ‘wins’ the item. You need a fast connection and no internet hitches to bid at the last second so you will probably bid in the last 3 or 4 seconds to be safe. Of course someone else is watching the three of you bidding up the price so when you have spent £30 bidding another person will start. This takes the bidders up to 4 so it’s no longer worth wasting your money.

Where it does differ from gambling is that you get creditback to spend as ‘discount’ against items sold. Nice idea that you could build up some savings as you have spent a fortune. The hitch is that you don’t get back anything like the amount you have spent, a few pence for each pound. Worst of all this credit must be spent in 3 days or it disappears.

In short, please don’t waste your money. Yes, somewhere in the world, one person will get an iPad for £5.00. Hundreds morewill have spent £50 to £100 trying and got nothing for it.

Ray
:mad: