I would like to congratulate quibids.com on one of the most incredible, and probably one of the most profitable marketing strategies in history. For those of you who don't know them, QuiBids is an online auction; but much different than e-Bay.
Essentially, you bid on an item that you want, and that they are selling. As I am writing this, I've been watching an Apple iPad 16 GB Wi-Fi up for auction. Each "bid" automatically increments the price one cent. If there are less than 10 seconds left on the clock, another 10 seconds are added. The clock on this item has been at less than 20 seconds for over two hours that I know of. When I first saw it, the “sell price” was less than $10.00. Eventually, someone is going to win a iPad at an incredible price; because it's only at $45.51 at the time of this writing.
What's the trick? Easy, you have to buy a "packet" of bids, which cost about 60 cents each. Every time you bid, it reduces your number of available bids by one; or, in other words, it costs you 60 cents to bid. So, QuiBids has already received over $2,700.00 for that $699.00 (retail) iPad I'm watching. That’s almost four times the retail price! Don't know what it'll finally sell for, but they're raking in a bundle on it already.
Just to make sure this wasn’t all a fluke, I looked at a few other items, here’s how they sold:
Retail Sold for Bid Income
Passport 230 GB external hard drive $69.00 $12.67 $396.00
Toshiba 40” 1080p LCD HDTV $599.90 $73.90 $2217.00
Xbox 360 250 GB Elite Controller $326.99 $43.18 $1294.50
Home Depot Gift Card $100.00 $10.14 $304.20
250 bids voucher on their system $150.00 $14.35 $861.00
Selling products for an average of over 500% over retail, and getting away with it. Like I said; pure genius.
The amazing thing is… I think this is legal.
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