Beezid.com is a popular penny auction site that has recently started advertising on TV, making it one of the larger auction sites and, of course, making it one that people have a lot of questions about.
A penny auction site, for those of you that don’t know, is an auction site where each bid you place is limited to one penny. This results in items that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars being sold for an unbelievably low fraction of the cost.
However, the difference between a penny auction and a standard auction website, is that at a penny auction site you must pay for each bid that you place. In general, these bids can cost anywhere between 50 cents and $1.00 per bid. So when you see that an item has sold for $50.00, remember that means it sold for 5000 bids, and even at 50 cents a piece that means the true sale price of the item is $2,500.00.
At Beezid.com, there is not standard price per bid. You buy a package of bids, and the larger (and more expensive) package you are willing to buy, the cheaper each individual bid is – as low as 60 cents a bid. But if you are unwilling to invest a lot of money into Beezid bids right away, and would like a smaller and cheaper package, you could actually pay 90 cents per bid. This means when you bid “one penny” each time, you are actually out almost one dollar per bid – and that could get expensive really fast.
So is Beezid.com a Scam?
In general, I don’t recommend any penny auction websites. It has been well documented at this point that penny auction sites are far more like gambling sites than they are auction sites. Real auctions don’t make you pay for the right to bid, nor do they limit you to a specific bid amount. In a penny auction site, if you lose the auction, you lose money.
The other problem with all penny auction sites is that the website acts as both seller and auctioneer. There is no third party to ensure that the behavior of the seller and buyer are appropriate. You’ll read complaints all over the internet of people who had the last bid on a penny auction site, were declared the winner, and then the auction magically started again with more people bidding and the price being driven up. Beezid.com itself has had these complaints.
But who are you supposed to complain to? The website? Who just earned a lot more money from letting the auction continue longer than it should have? Pretty much 100% of customers report that their responses in reporting these types of problems is the website claiming a “computer glitch” and apologizing for not being able to do anything.
And the problem with penny auctions is that in these cases, you don’t just lose the item you were trying to win when these “computer glitches” happen, you also lose money. This is why I tell people to stay away from penny auctions in general.
As for Beezid.com, they have had all the above complaints and then some. People have reported serious issues with their customer service, most specifically repeatedly receiving automated general help responses instead of a real email that addresses their specific questions and concerns. Customers report having to email and call repeatedly before having their problems addressed.
Another problem that is unique to Beezid.com, is the fact that they have no “Buy It Now” feature. Those of you familiar with penny auctions know the Buy It Now feature allows the losers of any given auction to buy the item they were bidding on at full retail price, less the amount of money they spent on bids trying to win it.
So if you were bidding on a $300 iPhone, and spent $90 in bids trying to win it, but still lost, for an extra $210 you can just purchase the item from their site. In this way you lost the auction, but at least you haven’t lost all the money you invested in trying to win it.
On Beezid.com, however, there is no Buy It Now feature. So if you lose $90 bidding on an iPhone, you have really just lost $90. For all these reasons, I would recommend staying away from Beezid.com.
If you just close that screen, and log back in, you can participate in the penny auctions.
I make the mistake of not checking reviews first so they got my money, but it was just a lesson learned to always check reviews first.
They Use to have a lot of crocked seller people on Ebay back about 19 years ago now , but That Company Has Really Cleaned up there back yard , and gottin rid of those type crocks . I have bought a LOT" of thing's off Ebay in the last few years , and can say , I've had Nothing but GOOD" things to say about the average seller on that site.... Very Good Experience using Ebay Actions and Paypal" ..... hope that helps out y'all... I Hate to here about or see somebody get ripped off . Especially on this Internet . It's a scary place y'all , protect yourself the BEST" you can , by doing your home work on here....
Dave