Lowest unique bid auction sites

[bignige]

How do sites like www.unique-bid.com work?

They say that the 'lowest unique bid gets the item' and bidding starts at 1p and there is no maximum - so surely 1p will always win?

Nigel

[Fitzer]

Nope, 'cos if everyone says' 1p must be the lowest bid' and promptly bids that then 1p is no longer a unique bid and so is not valid to win. From what I've seen in these competitions the winning bids tend to be something like �17.64, presumably because the very low numbers get multiple bids per amount.

[theo_wyvern]

fitzer is exactly right -the bid has to be unique to win so for example

Bid

[ianess]

Someone recently won a car for a unique bid of �27 plus a few pence.
Unique means the only one bid of that amount.

[buildersmate]

No doubt correct. The way these competitions work is that all the people that paid an entry fee to try and be the lowest unique bidder finance the cost of the prize awarded by the competition organiser - and the actual amount paid by the winner is, by comparison, chicken-feed. The organiser can then trumpet 'be a winner of a car for �27' and another lot of people try their hand in the next competition. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

[auctiongeek]

you have to be careful with a lot of these sites as they have unlimited entries, so you can end up paying pennies to enter but up against tens of thousands of other bidders.

Go for the sites that have a combination of low entry fees and limited entries. Then you have a better chance of winning while not costing too much if you don't win the auction.

www.bidclever.com seems to be the best for this (average between 40 and 200 per auction).

www.bidmax.com is not bad but most of their auctions need hundreds or thousands of bids to be placed.

Same with www.unique-bid.com