Swoopoo is back ... but as DealDash!

Swoopoo was the first penny auction site that started in UK and the whole phenomenon caught fire. Penny auctions remain popular in Europe and North America and are slowly expanding to other parts of the world. We can see a much more global penny auction marketplace thanks to what Swoopoo started.

Success story? Hardly. Swoopoo filed for bankruptcy last year. However, it looks like DealDash bought the domain Swoopoo. Swoopoo left some bad memories in penny auction bidders' minds. It looks like a gambit from DealDash, which is quite well placed itself today in the US. It would be exciting to see what the future holds. As of now, the swoopoo domain doesn't seem to have any hosting. How DealDash wants to play this would be interesting to watch. 

Price Consistency in DealDash

Read my Quibids Review and DealDash Review to know about these sites.

DealDash is a penny auction that is less crowded and competitive than more established sites like Quibids and at the same time, it is not new. You can read my DealDash analysis against Quibids to know how it compares against Quibids.

Today, I was looking through DealDash for HD Camcorders. These are common auction items at most big penny auctions. I was surprised by the price consistency: the last 3 items ended in the price range of less than $2. This is usually very rare for any penny auction. Of course this trend doesn't hold for very far back, but still, price consistency is very rare. Usually you have auctions that end at 10 times another auction end price.

Here are the three auctions I was looking at:
http://www.dealdash.com/battle.php?auction_id=48042 : $3.78
http://www.dealdash.com/battle.php?auction_id=47872 : $3.56
http://www.dealdash.com/battle.php?auction_id=47797 : $5.28

DealDash shares every closed auction for the bidders, unlike Quibids. It has a wealth of data that you can use to devise your auction strategy. This is priceless information for bidders.

DealDash vs Quibids: The Better Deal

DealDash is a penny auction site with multiple desirable features. Here I discuss DealDash vs Quibids in terms of which auction is likely to give a better deal. I had previously written about DealDash as a Quibids alternative. There are several reasons why I think DealDash is a great Quibids alternative.

When you are looking for penny auctions, the first and most important thing to look for is whether it is 100% legit. Both Quibids and DealDash are legit. However, another important aspect of DealDash is the same Buy-It-Now feature as Quibids. This is in sharp contrast to other famous penny auctions like Beezid or BidRivals. I personally think the buy it now feature is great as it reduces risk. Both Quibids and DealDash have the Buy It Now feature.

However, I claim that DealDash is less competitive than Quibids and thus you are more likely to get a better deal. I showed one example in my previous post and someone remarked that it could be biased as they were taken at different times. Well, so I have decided to do a more thorough analysis of DealDash vs Quibids in terms of competition and auction end prices.

One thing that makes my comparison easy is that both Quibids and DealDash have the same price of bids. At both these sites, bids cost $0.60 each.

DealDash lists all the auctions and all the winners in one place, which makes it one of the most open penny auctions (there are others that do this too, like BidRivals) and easy to get the data. Quibids on the other hand is surprisingly opaque in this regard. The only way to get data off Quibids is to use the search feature and you get an idea of the recently closed auctions.

I am taking laptops and netbooks as my sample space for the analysis. These are valuable items and are sold at both these sites. The time is between 14th March 2011 and 15th March 2011: Monday and Tuesday.

For both the auctions, I am rounding off the cost prices of items. To analyze, let us define an Auction Ratio as Auction End Price/Cost Price. This is a useful index here because the bids are the same value of $0.60 and all are 1 cent auctions. For convenience, I express this as a %. Note that this Auction Ratio doesn't take the money spent towards the bids but only the final price. The lower the Auction Ratio, the less competitive and thus more profitable it is to bid on it.

For DealDash, the details are as follows:

Product	Cost Price	Auction End Price	Auction Ratio
HP Mini Netbook	$500	$2.84	0.57%
Acer Aspire Netbook	$500	$22.90	4.58%
Lenovo Ideapad Netbook	$500	$1.46	0.29%
TimelineX Laptop	$900	$2.37	0.26%
HP Mini Netbook	$500	$6.15	1.23%

To calculate the overall Auction Ratio, the total cost price of all items is $2900 and the total (sum) auction end price is $35.72. The Overall Auction Ratio is 1.23%
NB: To verify, here are the URLs:
http://www.dealdash.com/battle.php?auction_id=46758
http://www.dealdash.com/battle.php?auction_id=46725
http://www.dealdash.com/battle.php?auction_id=46723
http://www.dealdash.com/battle.php?auction_id=46650
http://www.dealdash.com/battle.php?auction_id=46614

Now to Quibids. The only way to get data for Quibids is through the search. Here is the same table for Quibids

Product	Cost Price	Auction End Price	Auction Ratio
MSI Netbook	$314	$0.69	0.22%
Asus Netbook	$410	$0.82	0.20%
Asus Netbook	$368	$10.14	2.76%
MSI Netbook	$314	$49.25	15.68%
MSI Netbook	$314	$27.72	8.83%
Sony VAIO Laptop	$1112	$161.32	14.51%

To calculate the overall Auction Ratio, the total cost price of all items is $2832 and the total (sum) auction end price is $249.94. The Overall Auction Ratio is 8.83%
NB: To verify, here are the URLs:
http://www.quibids.com/auctions/273109509-MSI-10-Netbook
http://www.quibids.com/auctions/595038107-Asus-101-Netbook
http://www.quibids.com/auctions/473579399-Asus-Eee-PC-101-Netbook
http://www.quibids.com/auctions/858488388-MSI-10-Netbook
http://www.quibids.com/auctions/892482832-MSI-10-Netbook
http://www.quibids.com/auctions/170976630-Sony-VAIO-164-Entertainment-Laptop

To summarize, the Overall Auction Ratio of DealDash is 1.23% and that of Quibids is 8.83% in the sample space taken above - all laptops and netbooks at both the sites for 2 days. The data will obviously vary depending on the day. The only reason to choose these particular dates is because this is the only data available for Quibids (later data isn't available as of now).

It can now be said that in the above auctions, DealDash was about 7 times less competitive than Quibids.

Therefore if you are looking for general products available on both these sites, then DealDash appears to be less competitive. Be sure to Check out DealDash

Quibids Alternative: DealDash

To all my readers, I would like to recommend a new penny auction called DealDash as a good Quibids alternative. They are not really a new penny auction - they are in business for 2 years now. However, they take great pains to keep the site neat and profitable for the bidders. I don't think they have as aggressive a marketing campaign like Quibids or Beezid, so they are not as well known but they are very good.

The thing I like about DealDash is they try their best to give it a very personal touch, even though there are thousands of bidders there. The customer service is very good (as good as Quibids and certainly many times better than Beezid). Their personal care shows across the site, for example, you can see their blog which has videos from their employees explaining offers and features. I have not seen many sites do that, and even less in the penny auction industry.

DealDash is a legit penny auction and is BBB Accredited as well. It is much less competitive than Quibids, which means you will have a superior winning chance here than at Quibids.

But now the most important question: How profitable is DealDash compared to Quibids?

To know this, you will have to take a case study - a sample of products sold at both these sites. I prefer to choose a reasonably priced item, so I picked a 12 MP camera from both these stores, of comparable prices, around $110 retail. So how does DealDash compare to Quibids?

The screenshots of auctions from the last week are shown below. As you can see, DealDash is over 10 times cheaper than Quibids in this auction. This seems to be the general trend and not limited to just this one auction.


So DealDash appears to have a very good choice of items. Of course, Quibids still remains the largest penny auction out there, but if you can find the product you are looking for also on DealDash, you can save much more money than on Quibids. In addition, I encourage you to check out the prices of previously won auctions on DealDash and Quibids and you will see how Quibids is no longer as profitable as it once was.

DealDash is not exactly new in that it is not a few months old. It has established itself well in a niche field of penny auctioners who are looking for some good cheap deals with an honest and accredited penny auction.

I would really like to hear from you how you found DealDash as compared to Quibids.

Disclaimer: DealDash have agreed to sponsor this blog but they have in no way influenced what is written and have not provided me any content, have in no way told me what to write about them and are in no way responsible for the content that I post about them or other sites on this blog. Everything written in this blog is 100% my original thoughts.