www.telebid.com

custardy

amusing but very profitable.especially as they probably hold no stock and buy after the auction

soolin

Telebid have been doing a lot of viral marketing recently but i don't expect them to last long once people realise how much they are paying for their bargains.

Anglingman

mojam55, don't be confused by the price displayed. This auction was probably fixed price or 100% off. As such the purchase price is MUCH MUCH lower than the current bid price. It is Telebids way of encouraging more and more bids.

In the end Telebid and the winning bidder will both be happy having made considerable savings/profit at the expense of all the losing bidders. The concepts is very simple but very effective as it taps into peoples greed and in built desire for a "bargin". I have no problems with the concept of the site, you just have to be very fortunate to actually win an auction

Bamber19

Anglingman wrote: »

I have no problems with the concept of the site, you just have to be very fortunate to actually win an auction

Probably because it earns you money. The fact remains that telebid are taking in more money than the final auction price, which itself is often 3 times the retail price of the item. It's a short term money spinner for you and the other owners but it wont last.

Anglingman

Bamber, I am not at all involved with Telebid, frankly I wish I was ! The final bid price is often NOT the price that is actually paid, items that "sell" for large "auction" prices are invariably 100% or fixed price auctions, don't confuse the screen price with the sale price they are very much different. Yes, I agree they are making extraordinary amounts of money. But it is legal and people being people it will continue. Like you I get disillusioned when I bid and spend money but don't win an item, I have yet to win anything however Telebids future is secure as peoples greed will always bring both new customers and retain the old ones. Unless legislation changes to control auctions, which I don't believe it will then Telebid will thrive. It would be interesting to find out just how many people have complained about the site.

Like all things the simple ideas are often the most effective, I wish I had thought of it, then I would not be sitting here writing on a money saving forum !

Anetares

Wish I could recall my first post.. Hmm, pretty sure it wasn't defending the business model of another website. In any case, setting that aside...

I don't believe anyone said Telebid is an illegally operating organisation, nor do I believe anybody said they were going to "complain" about it. There isn't any need to reiterate that it's legal or try to draw people out about "complaining" about Telebid.

People are simply giving opinions on Telebid, some of which indicate that they think consumers can get better deals elsewhere. This is the Warnings board, people are using it to warn each other of the fact you could stand to lose a lot of money at Telebid if you don't understand the complicated purchasing and bid increments etc.

As pointed out previously, Telebid stand to make a lot of profit at the expense of the customers who do not "win". A lot of people would not like to see fellow shoppers fall into this trap, it has nothing to do with people resenting a business making money.. it's the way in which they do it.

Yes, from the PoV of greed, the Telebid creators are probably feeling quite pleased with themselves for thinking up such a simple way to part other greedy fools from their money. I know it's survival of the financially fittest, natural selection of the bank statement, etc. etc. etc. but that doesn't make it right.

cryptoguru

It's actually worse than what has been explained.
The winner has to pay the price they won the item at as well as for their bid tokens, their bids just get them the right to buy it.

If we look at an actual auction that recently ended:

A Sony Playstation 3 with 40GB HDD sold for £64.40 plus £9.80 delivery, they claim its price is normally £319.99.
You can get one new on ebay for £239.99 with £20 delivery.

Let's say the winning bidder spent 20 bids, they only pay £94.20 including delivery, that's a real-world saving of 64% ... quite a bargain if you ask me.

The problem is that for it to have got to £64.40, 920 bids were placed. Which means that telebid made a stonking 920*50p plus £64.40 (if we assume their delivery is at cost)
that's £524.40, well over double the price of the Playstation off ebay. In fact telebid make 8.14 times as much on the item as what they auction it for. So when it says savings of 80% they're actually making 160%.

What's easy to forget of course is that if everyone placed 20 bids (which is probably a huge overestimation) there's another 46 people who paid for your deal. It's basically relying on the fact that people get trigger-happy as the time approaches zero ... 'maybe this time I'll get it' ... only to have realised that everyone else is thinking the same, and the time goes back up again. This keeps on going until people have bid too many times and think, I don't think I'll get this ... better give up now. Eventually it slows down until one or two people who have spent A LOT on bidding war each other out to the end.

It's basically gambling! Let's say you have a 2% chance of being the winner. If you invest 20 bids on average in an auction then you'll need to bid on average of 50 auctions before winning so you'll be spending an average £500 on bidding per win; don't think you'll make enough savings to justify that.
It's not a lot different to a game of online Texas hold 'em only there's more skill required at playing poker, plus you have an idea of your chances with poker.

In fact it's a cross between gambling and a MLM like Amway, where everyone is sold a dream and everyone else pays for you to have yours!

There is one possible way to make telebid work in your favour and that is to analyse the statistics of how many times an auction gets to 2 seconds or less (or something similar). It will be proportional to the RRP of the item, as people are willing to spend more on bidding if they're saving roughly 60%+ off a more expensive item.
You may be able to determine the maximum amount of bids you'd need to spend to get to the end of the auction. You can then factor in the cost of bidding and your expected end-price of the item. Then you just have to bid everytime the auction hits 2 seconds and hopefully you won't run out.

nicky1312

im just being nosey about this telebid does anyone know if u just happened to be a lucky winner after maybe just a couple of bids do u recieve the goods ok and how much is delivery does anyone know?

been sitting watching these they must be making a complete fortune and more

p4r4s1t3

it's a rip off.

I bought 20 bids, and I was bidding on a nintendo DS. Obviously, 20 bids/£10 worth went in about 2 minutes. I thought i'd carry on, iv got a few bids left and it's still going. However...it gets down to 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 1 second..someone else bids, it goes back up to 20 seconds. Then every now and then, instead of jumping back to 20 seconds, it goes up to 5, even 10 minutes.

How is that fair?

cryptoguru

p4r4s1t3 wrote: »

it's a rip off.

I bought 20 bids, and I was bidding on a nintendo DS. Obviously, 20 bids/£10 worth went in about 2 minutes. I thought i'd carry on, iv got a few bids left and it's still going. However...it gets down to 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 1 second..someone else bids, it goes back up to 20 seconds. Then every now and then, instead of jumping back to 20 seconds, it goes up to 5, even 10 minutes.

How is that fair?

It's not fair ... it's a scam!

This is how telebid works. The price goes up 7p every time someone bids, if the time is near zero and someone bids, then they add time to the auction, it'll keep going like this until everyone gives up, then the last person to bid has won.
It's rather shrewd and relies on people, like yourself, who are drawn in by the lure of a very good deal who buy a few bids and think "I'll have a go".

Read my post above it explains how much money they're making off this scam ... it may be possible to beat the system though. The trick is to only bid when it gets down to about 2 seconds and below. You need to factor in the cost of how many times it's likely to get down to 2 seconds or less and keep going until you win. There will be a minimum amount of times too that it goes below 2 seconds before a bid is ended, so you can start bidding then and keep going until the end. It may cost you £100 in bids, but who cares if you can guarantee you'll get the thing for £100s of pounds cheaper than the shops. You could then sell it on ebay full price!

I've realised there is something called a fixed price auction and a 100% savings auction ... in the first case if you win the bid you get the object for a very low fixed price e.g. 90% cheaper than its retail price. In the second case you get the item for free.
These auctions cause a bidding frenzy and quite often the would-be auction price ends up over the retail price. No-one cares because they get it cheap or free, but telebid care ... because they get much more from the excessive bidding on the item.

Here's an example:-

Apple MacBook MB062 2.16 GHz White


was on at RRP £829 ... but you get it free when you win ... that's 100% saving.
The bidding took it to £523.11 ... which the winner didn't have to pay (they just have to pay the delivery of £9.80).

Telebid got 523.11/0.07*50p = £3736.50
Whooaaa!!

They don't even have to stock the thing ... they can order it from play.com at £819.99 and you pay for delivery.
They made £2916.51profit on that one item ... and didn't even have to handle it or store it or even be nice to you.