knofun

I click on a lot of ads… sorry ppc guys I rarely buy stuff but I click all the time to see what other marketers are up to. So I was cruising a tech deals site, and saw an ad for this site Swoopo. The ad had like 3 products on it for ridiculous discounts:

Great deals right? Clicky clicky. On the homepage there are a ton of auctions going on, everything for amazingly low prices. You can see the bids in real time, so bids are updating all over the place and its very exciting. Clicky clicky. So I signed up, and got the normal verification emails and blah blah blah. I also got a strange email with their  terms and conditions attached. Usually when things come with too much cover-your-ass type material there is a good reason.

So the way Swoopo works is you buy “packs” of “bids” for $0.75 per bid. You then use these bids to bid on products. Each “bid” increases the price of the product by $0.15 and pushes the end time of the auction back by 20 seconds. This enables other people to bid and push the end time back, and the vicious cycle continues. Here’s where it gets really good. So assuming all the suckers get bored and someone finally wins the auction after spending bid after bid after bid, YOU STILL HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE OF THE ITEM!!!

So lets run this back with a lil test case. I just saw a Playstation 3 go for $126.15. With an MSRP of $399.99 this may seem like a heck of a deal. Let’s do the math. They state that every product starts at $0.15 and every time someone spends one of their $0.75 “bids” the price goes up $0.15. So that would be  840 “bids” that cost $0.75 each or $630 to Swoopo. Then the person who “wins” has to pay $126.15 + “shipping” however much that is. Lets give them the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume they only charge $10 for shipping. That is $766.15 in revenue to Swoopo for a PS3 they probably got in bulk at a steep discount.

The terms break all this down, anyone who is into internet marketing HAS to at least admire the hustle on this one.

web marketing swoopo