Quibids Auction: TRS Ballistic Premium 3 Pc. Luggage Set

Here is a strange Quibids featured auction for you: TRS Ballistic Premium 3 Pc. Luggage Set. Usually, Quibids just sticks to the safer options of electronics or vacation packages, but it is good to see that the site is experimenting with new products. This gives some variety and excitement to penny auctions at Quibids which can seem monotonous and uninteresting in terms of auction types.

Quibids, of course being the largest player in the penny auction market, can experiment with different products because they can more easily absorb any losses.

This product is listed at a price of $2250, so one lucky winner might get it at a far lower price. It would be interesting to see where this auction ends because I think not many people would jump on the auction and it might as well be a calm sub $100 ending auction. Of course penny auction predictions are notoriously difficult so I shouldn't try to make those and just see how the auction proceeds.

Quibids MacBook Pro Bundle Sells for $535.40

The Quibids Featured Auction of the Week was again a Quibids MacBook Pro Bundle, priced at about $4000. The final price for the ending auction was $535.40. Congratulations to the winner, banyquis!
You can find the Auction here.

The winning bid was placed by a BidoMatic. This is not always the case with Quibids mainly because it limits its automatic bidding tool usage, quite unlike penny auctions like BidRivals where almost every auction is won by automatic bidding tools only.

So what were the economics of Quibids auction for MacBook Pro? Here is a small calculation:

Cost Price of the Bundle= $3935.95
No. of Bids Placed: $535.40/$0.01 = 53,540
Selling Price of the Bundle = $535.40
Total cost of bids placed = 53540x$0.60 = $32,124
Quibids Profit = $32124 + $535.40 - $3935.95 = 28,723.45

Total Quibids profit for MacBook Pro Bundle is $28,723.45! That sure is a significant amount. However, the winner got this for a 79% discount and had to place 461 bids to win the auction.

Quibids Review: Misleading Price Information

There are several posts where I talk about Quibids review. Quibids is a great penny auction site that is legitimate, which means they are not closing shop after robbing you, like so many other sites on the internet. However, that doesn't mean that everything they do is good. There are things I don't like about Qubids, which is the purpose of my series on Quibids review.

Here, I want to talk about Quibids price as shown for the items that are previously won. What I mean is, when you open an auction for say 100 Quibids bids, you will see, on the left hand side of the page, information about how much the item was sold for recently.


In the image above, you can see that Quibids 100 bids voucher shows for selling at $0.01. Wow, now that can be some misleading information! Of course, this is the lowest price it can go to, but as all Quibids bidders know, this is HIGHLY unlikely. Quibids wants to attract more people by showing cheaper prices for products. Of course they are not lying because there was an auction that did sell for so cheap - see the image below.


However, these events are extremely rare, and can easily mislead new Quibids customers into expecting this to be the price. Experienced Quibids users may easily see through this.

The average price, I am guessing, will easily be 500 times or more! Here is a typical Quibids 100 bids auction:


What I don't like is that Quibids changed this very recently. Up to a few months ago, they would never try to show the cheapest auction price in the 'Recently Sold for' section. This is a recent change. In fact, I remember at the very earliest times, they would deliberately put a very high price here! The reason I think was because if they put up a very low price, people might suspect it to be a scam. However, of late, more and more people seem to know about penny auctions.

I like Quibids because it is different from all the rest of these sites. However, by towing the line by showing the cheapest price as that for which the item was recently sold, Quibids is simply losing the tag being good and honest. There are many positive changes in Quibids too, which I like, but this is not one of them.

How to Win on Quibids: Part - 1

Learn how to win on Quibids before you spend money on the site. This is an extension post to my existing post on Quibids strategy-1: Volunteer's Dilemma. The purpose of this post is to make things simple and explain once more, in detail, how this works.

When deciding strategies or how to win on Quibids or any other penny auction site, it is important to consider 2 factors:
1. Economics
2. Psychology

People tend to ignore the last one, but it turns out that the psychology of the bidders plays a more important role than the economics of the situation. This is why, there is no universal Quibids strategy that will always win. However, you can maximize your chances depending on the auction at hand. Any person with some experience on Quibids or a similar penny auction site will tell you the same.

The Quibids strategy based on the Volunteer's Dilemma works because you are being aggressive. Highly aggressive. This tends to scare bidders, especially the careful ones. This is important to remember because most of the bidders at Quibids are simply looking to get lucky - place a bid and pray no one outbids them. This is ridiculous - Quibids is famous and has many people at any given time. You can easily beat most of the Quibids bidders this way by being aggressive.

When 2 people are being aggressive simultaneously, only one can win. The person who can remain tenacious longer will be the winner, as simple as that. This is how to win on Quibids - you have to hold your own against aggressive bidders. If you are looking not to waste bids, then you will end up winning almost nothing while spending a few bids on all auctions, thus losing a lot in total.

When you start out on an auction, you should make sure that you never quit. If you do, you will end up losing much more than what you bargained for. However, if your total bids exceed the price of the item, you can as well stop and use the "But it Now" option of Quibids. This is great so that your losses are limited but your profits are not.

I have a whole series on how to win on Quibids and Quibids strategies, so make sure you understand the rules of the game before going out there and winning. Good luck to all my readers!

Quibids Auction - Millionth Auction Winner tease

So Quibids is back to teasing all the users. They send out a newsletter, not with the name of the winner, but with an announcement of an announcement 2 weeks from now! Apparently Quibids will announce the winner in a couple of weeks.

For those who do not know, Quibids is celebrating the million auctions since the site started. Quibids is giving away $10,000 in cash to the millionth auction winner, the auction remaining anonymous and for the moment, the winner too.

This is a great achievement in my opinion, at a time when other Penny Auction sites like Swipebids and Swipeauctions turn into outright scams and few others like Swoopoo are just unable to compete with very limited products. Quibids has emerged a clear winner in the battle of the best Penny Auctions on the internet, and its prospects only seem to be getting brighter.

If you are looking to win at Quibids, you can read through my posts on Quibids strategies. I have a 3 part series so far, but will include other strategies as well.

Quibids Strategy 3: The Waiting Game (exposing some Quibids Myths)

This is Part 3 of the series on Quibids strategies that I want to publish. These strategies are not conjured up from thin air. They are written from personal experience, but more importantly, personal research. Most penny auction strategies, like Quibids strategies, are to do with Game theory and probability.

You can also find Part - 1 and Part - 2, which deal with different strategies.

Theoretical Efficiency Vs. Practical efficiency:

To understand Quibids and indeed any other Penny Auctions, you should first understand that the theoretical best Quibids strategy need not be the best practical strategy.

To illustrate, consider a typical Quibids macbook auction, as shown below:

The cost of the Macbook, finally, was $426.65. This was a 1 cent Quibids auction (see the top left hand side of the image). This means each bid incremented the cost of the macbook by 1 cent. Thus, in all, there were 42,665 bids placed. That's quite a lot of bids!

Now, consider the time it takes for placing these many bids. This is a really hard question to answer, as anyone who has followed the Quibids auctions knows. There could be 2 people bidding in tandem, in which case things can move quickly but usually people only place their bids when there are less than 5 seconds left.

As an average case, I am assuming it takes 2.5 seconds between bids (I think it is a good number for an average in this case. Other smaller auctions usually have larger average time between bids).

So the time required to complete the auction is 42,665 * 2.5 seconds = 106,662.5 seconds. This comes out to 29.6 hours. That is a huge time interval of over 1 day!

Now, let me ask you - how many people can sit non-stop in front of their computer looking at the auction process for nearly 30 hours to choose their best strategy? Not many.

This is why the theoretical best Quibids strategies will differ so much from the practical best Quibids strategies.

Best Theoretical Quibids Strategy:

Here is the best theoretical Quibids strategy: Wait for the last moment to place your bid. This means, bid on the Quibids auction when the timer is 1 second.

This seems simple enough and most people intuitively do use this for their bidding - let the people fight it out and I'll come in when the time is right.

This is a simple strategy and people are easily deceived by its applications. Let me expose the myth that this is THE strategy to apply to penny auctions. In fact, all the videos on Youtube that claim to show 100% Quibids strategy wins simply use this basic technique, which turns out, isn't the best practical strategy after all for all Quibids auctions.

The problem is, this isn't always the best practical strategy. For example, in the above Macbook auction, can you sit for 30 hours non-stop in front of your computer to see when the timer reaches 1 second? Well, I don't think so.

When to use this Quibids Strategy:
The waiting game strategy should ONLY be used for small Quibids auctions. By small, I mean auctions that usually have less than 200 bids placed on them. In such cases, you can win Quibids auctions by using this Quibids strategy of waiting till the timer goes to 1 second and bidding.

Word of Caution:
When you are using this waiting game Quibids strategy, it is very important that you never quit! This holds even if there is an aggressive bidder, using a strategy I described here (who uses the volunteer's dilemma problem).

The reason for this is simple: If you quit, you will be left with nothing at all. This doesn't hold for all strategies, but in this instance, you must not quit.

Why People Fail?
This particular Quibids strategy seems intuitive - you wait till the last moment to bid, thus saving your bids and ensuring they are not wasted when someone else is placing his bid before yours.

So why do people fail? Simple - they quit!
When someone is bidding aggressively, they will quit. The problem with this strategy is that it appears to reduce risk, while the truth is it can practically be a very high risk Quibids strategy. The reason for this is what people practically do - they get intimidated by aggressive bidders and never win. They lose a few bids in hundreds of auctions and thus they end up with nothing to show for their efforts and bids.

Therefore, this seemingly simple Quibids strategy can backfire and you need to ensure you know exactly why, when and how to use it. Do not try this on big auctions like Holiday trips, cars and macbooks.

What Auctions Can I win this way?
Try out the smaller bids: 15,25 bid auctions are ideal for this. Also, anything with a price of less than $30 can be a good start. Once you know how never to quit and understand how Quibids auctions work, you can proceed to slightly bigger auctions (but never on the heavyweights!)

Good luck Quibids bidding!

Quibids Badges: New incentives for the Website

It has been a while I have written about Quibids, and in the meantime, there have been a number of improvements. You can read about Quibids strategies in my previous blog posts if you are serious about winning at Quibids.

In this post, I want to cover how you can win a little more with Quibids and effectively improve your winning chances.

Quibids has just announced special 'badges' for the members. There seems to be a badge for everything. The good thing is, you get free bids with your badges (I am no fan of virtual badges as such anyway).

In order to get your badges, you will need to claim the badges by logging into your account. The bids are not added by default - you need to claim them.

How to claim your badges?
You will need to log into your Quibids account. There is a new tab titled Achievements. You will see a list of badges that you are 'eligible' for. I don't see any reason why you should not accept a badge - after all, all badges come with free bids. You just click on 'claim' to claim your badge and also your free bids, which are then added to your account.

What kind of Bids are added?
Unfortunately, you will again see virtual bids and not purchased bids added to your account. I am not a big fan of Virtual bids and that is one thing I would like to see disappear from the website. I would consider both virtual and purchased bids should be at par. But well, different people have different opinions about it.

I suspect one reason for still persisting with virtual bids is that Quibids allows you to reverse your purchase and get back cash for the bids that you purchased. It would not be fair to allow monetization of virtual bids. However, I would still like to see virtual bids being counted towards the price of an auction if you don't win.

Here is a screenshot of some of the badges that I have won. You can also see how many free bids are given with each badge in the picture.

It would be great if my readers can share their own badges and their stories. Do you like the concept of badges?

Quibids: New items, new promotions

Quibids has been actively churning out new products and deals for its customers. This is natural, because with the hype, Quibids can make healthy profits off just one item.

For example, a few weeks ago, Quibids had a promotion offer selling a car. That's right, it is a big deal! Quibids put its market value at $20,000. The car was Honda Civic Coupe LX. This is the auction page screenshot after the winner was declared.


As you can see, the item sold for $1740.78, which is a significant saving for the winner. Unfortunately, there is only one winner and everyone else loses. In any auction, there are only two winners - the auction winner and Quibids!

Lets us calculate how Quibids rakes in the money through these auctions by doing a simple calculation from our side.

The auction is a 2 cent auction, and the total value the car sold at is $1740.78.
Thus the total number of bids placed by all Quibidders is 174078/2 = 87,039.
Total revenue for Quibids from this auction = 87,039 X $0.60 = $52,223.4
Total profit for Quibids from this auction = $52223.4 - $20,000 = $32223.4

From a single auction, Quibids has made over $30,000 in pure profits! Quibids claims a small revenue, but really, I am sure they rake in the moolah. The company wants to be open but is surprisingly closed like most other penny auction sites. Quibids is not an outright scam but if a company makes so much money at the expense of its customers, it is something to pause and ponder about.

Now, let us see how much all the Quibidders except the winner, merkmerk, have lost.

Total number of bids placed = 87,039
Bids by the winner = 2,044
Total bids lost = 87,039 - 2,044 = 84,995
Total value of lost bids = 84,995 X $0.6 = $50,997

Thus, in this single auction, all Quibidders combined lost over $50,000! Unbelievable, but true. Quibids and other penny auctions seem to be worse than gambling, where even compulsive gamblers will have a limit to their losses.