ArrowOutlet.com is a new penny auction site. A penny auction, if you haven’t heard of one before, is a type of auction where you purchase bids – priced at $.50 each at Arrow Outlet – to use in attempt to win brand new, popular items at extremely discounted prices.
Unlike regular auctions, you are not given the ability to bid your own price. Instead, you simply make a bid, which raises the “cost” of the item by a few cents. Once the clock has run out and someone has won the auction, the winner must pay the final price of the item, despite whatever costs they have already paid in bids.
In addition, the clock functions differently at a penny auction website than at traditional auction websites. Here, every time someone bids, the clock is reset, meaning that the auction can go on indefinitely as long as people are actively bidding. Like most other penny auction websites, if you lose your auction, you have the Buy It Now option of simply purchasing the item at full retail cost, less part of the costs of the bids you already spent during the auction.
So is Arrow Outlet Legit?
Arrow Outlet is what would happen if you crossbred a casino and a standard penny auction site. They have so many things going on, it’s hard to know where to begin.
First, all penny auctions are heavily criticized for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most well known and popular criticism stems from the fact that penny auction sites are both the seller and the auctioneer, which means that the sites themselves benefit greatly from having the auctions continue as long as possible. This tends to create many bad feelings between the buyers and the site, especially if there are ever technical or clock glitches.
But, beyond the standard criticisms of penny auction sites, Arrow Outlet has some issues that are unique to them. First and foremost, they have the Bid-O-Matic, which is a bot they encourage their users to utilize. The Bid-O-Matic places bids for you, and you don’t even have to be at home. It starts and stops and bids as often as you program it to.
In addition, the more you bid, the more you “Level Up,” and each time you “Level Up,” you are given a grab bag prize which you can either accept or exchange for further bids.
Both of these features are obviously meant to encourage frequent and potentially mindless bidding, keeping in mind that each bid costs $.50.
But perhaps the biggest red flag at Arrow Outlet is their Buy It Now feature. Unlike the way Buy It Now works at other sites, here it only takes $.10 of each bid into account when you buy the item at retail price. For example, say you are bidding on a $50 item and use $40 in bids (which is already a bad idea).
If you lose the auction and would then like to Buy It Now, you will only be given credit for $8 toward your Buy It Now item. So you spent $40 on bidding and $42 on the item, meaning you just paid $82 for an item that retails for $50. It seems that there are better ways to spend your money.
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