BidRivals.com is a new penny auction site that has been getting a lot of attention. Penny auctions are a specific niche in the online auction community that have been getting progressively more popular recently.
These websites have risen in popularity because they promise in demand, expensive items at unbelievably low prices. But often what isn’t advertised, is the specific way in which penny auctions work. In a penny auction, you are only allowed to bid a single penny at one time. The prices that these items “sell” for is so unbelievably low because the bids are done in increments of one cent.
However, for each bid you place, you pay 65 cents to BidRivals.com. That means if an item is sold for $20.00 on BidRivals.com, Bid Rivals actually makes $1300 for the sale of that item.
So is Bid Rivals a Scam?
In my opinion, people would be better off to avoid all penny auctions, regardless of their reputation.
BidRivals.com and other penny auction sites require people to pay for the option to bid, but don’t allow them to bid in increments of their choosing. This places Bid Rivals in direct control of the price that the consumer will ultimately be paying them, while they are acting as though they’re a non-interested third party.
On other auction sites, like eBay, the seller and buyer have the auction monitored by the website, which is a trusted third party. On BidRivals.com, there is no trusted third party. Bid Rivals is both the seller and the auctioneer. It benefits them – and only them – to drive the price up in these tiny one cent increments.
Bid Rivals tries to get favor from their customers by offering a “Buy It Now” option, which allows you to take the amount of your failed bids and put them toward the retail price of the item you were bidding on. This way, you are not supposed to feel as though you “lost” your money… well, except for the shipping and handling and potentially processing fee that Bid Rivals will charge you.
But if you’re not willing to part with that extra money (not wanting to pay full retail price for that item was probably what brought you to BidRivals.com in the first place), then you’re simply out your money with nothing to show for it.
In generally, people would be much better off sticking to legitimate auction websites like eBay, instead of spending lots of frustrating time and money on penny auctions like BidRivals.com.
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