

Swoopo: Selling items for more and less than they're worth, at the same time - cwan
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/11/play_to_lose

======
portman
FYI, Swoopo has already attracted 131+ competitors. Traffic stats for all of
them are maintained here:

<http://www.pennyauctiontraffic.com/>

~~~
hello_moto
In Indonesia, a 3rd world country not known for its internet, there are 13
similar sites already.

~~~
anamax
The speaker for <http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/091202.html>
said that an interesting fraction of computer crime originated in Indonesia.
It's not the US, Russia, China, the Baltics, or Korea, but ....

~~~
duskwuff
... Indonesia, Turkey, Vietnam, and Romania. At $work, that's where easily 90%
of our fraud comes from.

------
jerguismi
There types of sites are very popular in Finland, there have been like 10
services coming after the first one. And it's very good business, even for a
such little market as Finland.

It's pretty easy to create bots for these type of sites. Couple of my friends
created bot and got something like 30k from the process. Of course the sites
try to limit the usage of bots.

~~~
eob
How does the bot AI work? Look for a lull in the bid rates? It seems like it
would be hard to know when other people aren't also sitting there waiting to
pounce on the auction.

------
jasonwong
I remember seeing a penny auction for an iMac sell for 236 dollars. At .60 a
bid, that's $14,160 in revenue, or 12k profit. Absolute insanity. That being
said, I think they've hit a critical mass. What will probably end up happening
is that those that buy bids realize that they're buying overpriced lotto
tickets, and bore of the game. But there will always be more fools to the
fire.

------
hello_moto
eBay + gambling = Swoopo like services :)

------
clistctrl
I registered an account to see what else is visible in the bid window. The
interesting part for me was their "Tiered packages" that takes advantage of
customers by playing off their assumptions that buying more bids at one time
would be cheaper. If you do the math, no matter how much you buy at one time
bids are always $.60 each.

------
foobar2k
This is the old "dollar store" model of business. Tempt customers in with
insane bargains, and they'll thing everything is a bargain even if it isn't.

~~~
zandorg
It's not like that. It's just a store where if you get lucky, you get it for a
dollar, but it could take months to get lucky. A dollar store is not a gamble,
other than gambling the item you bought is worth _slightly_ more than in
another store.

