BidFunReviews 117

Be afraid. Be very afraid! This is an extremely clever way for BidFun to make shed loads of money at your expense. I myself was just about drawn in until I analysed the figures and, more importantly, the tactics.

Granted, the percentages that they show people have saved, are very impressive, but BidFun conveniently don't show you what they themselves have actually made from an item. I'll give you an example.

The percentages that the winning bidders save look impressively high. The lowest actual percentage saving that I found was a healthy looking 40%. That's still a good bit less than the RRP, you would say.

That particular item had an RRP of £180.00. The winning bid was £107.91, making a saving of £72.09 for the "lucky" bidder, but here's the catch. Each bid only increases the selling price by 1 penny so, to achieve a winning bid of £107.91, there has to be 10,791 bids. The price that you pay for each individual bid ranges from between 40 to 50 pence. This depends on the block of prepaid bids that you buy. Even using the lowest of 40 pence a bid for this example, the minimum money BidFun made from the bidding alone on this item was £4,316.40. Added together with the £107.91 that they made from the actual winning bid, makes a grand total of £4,424.31. Not bad for an item that has an RRP of £180.00.

But wait, the really clever part is how they achieve a high number of bids. The clock continually counts down towards the end of the auction but as each bid is made, an extra 20 seconds is added to the clock. Even when the clock reaches, what you would think to be, the end the auction, it may not be, and normally isn't, finished. It then goes into, what BidFun call, "checking" mode. This, as they claim, is because their clocks are waiting for further information from their servers, to see if there are any new bids that have been recorded before the auction ended. If there are, then these are displayed, together with an update of the countdown timer. This update can add seconds, minutes or hours to an auction. So, effectively the auction doesn't finish when you actually expect it to. In fact, it can go on for hours more with more and more money being poured into BidFun's pockets.

Don't do it people! If you are still not convinced, then do a little calculation for yourself. Take a look at any item from the "finished auctions" section. Break the winning bid down into pence, multiply it by 0.4 and you have the minimum money that bidders have spent on bids alone. Try it, it's frightening!

Now, if after that you still feel like having a go, then you fully deserve to be taken for all that you have. Remember the saying, "If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is."

Its not a scam per sea, but its NOT WORTH YOUR TIME AND MONEY! Bidfun.com should be considered a very clever way to auction high end products at a low cost, SO it seems... What you don't realize at first, is that you pay upfront to receive a certain # of bids. Each bid costs anywhere from $0.80-$1.00. Each time you or someone bids, you lose the $0.80-$1.00 that you spent on the bid and the price goes up by $0.01 and the countdown timer gets 20 more seconds every time a bid is placed to allow bidders (including you) time to react and place another bid. This is like in an auction house where the auctioneer asks for any more bids before stopping an auction. This continuously happens where you can bid 50 times, losing $50, and the auction price only goes up by $0.50. DO NOT FALL FOR THIS, IF YOU WANT TO BID ON SOMETHING, MAKE SURE YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR THE BIDS AND THAT YOU ARE GOING TO RECEIVE SOMETHING IN RETURN!