Would you pay money to place a bid? We are all familiar with Ebay for online auctioning websites which work the traditional way. You place a bid, and the winner pays and takes the item. Swoopo works a little different.

Here is how Swoopo works. The price you see is not the actual price you pay. It’s simply for cosmetics and attraction such as an Apple iPhone for $15.00. Each bid placed goes up from a penny to 20 cents. Each bid also costs $.75 to place. After placing the bid, the timer on the auction will jump up by 5, 10, 15, or 20 seconds. Its genious how the concept works for the business because there will only be one winner and those that did not win, looks like they gave their money for donation to the company. The person that won, probably paid a fraction of the cost of the item itself. The winner probably did not pay just $15.00 for the ipod, instead he probably had about 50-100 bids or so placed and a dollar for each bid. So in the end, the winner probably paid less than $125 + shipping and handling which is still a third of the cost of the phone.

It’s quite interesting how it works and to win, I assume takes strategy for when to bid at the right time ot win with the lowest bids placed, saving you money.

What do you think about this site and would you use it?