Beezid Scam???

Once again, the Internet is abuzz with talk of the alleged “Beezid scam”, and the message boards and forums are lighting up with comments and/or war stories, some in total vilification of Beezid, and some in defense of Beezid. I wanted to write this article as a way to give a brief explanation of what the fuss is all about, and really just to give my personal take on the whole Beezid craze (or outrage, depending on your experience). Beezid.com is another website in the increasingly popular penny auction genre, where basically people bid on brand new, name-brand products that everyone knows and loves, and the bids are always in one-penny increments. The trick of it is, the auction has a “countdown” timer that resets itself every time someone places a bid. Once the timer runs out, whoever is the highest bidder wins the auction (and the item bid upon, of course). The big hoo-hah about all of this is that you can possibly snag some serious discounts off the retail price of the product if you’re the auction winner. There have been several accounts of people winning brand new Dell laptops for less than $100, people winning brand new iPods for less than $5.00, etc., and it’s all based on how much of a bidding ninja you are with the Beezid bidding system. Some have speculated that this type of thing cannot possibly be legal, and that there’s no way people can buy merchandise for that cheap without it being a ripoff, knockoff, or one-off. Well, the truth of the matter is that the merchandise is fully legit, and that people actually do win auctions where they get super-duper deep discounts on these types of items, but I’m not preaching the “gospel of Beezid”, because quite honestly, I kinda feel like the whole process of buying bid packs, feverishly bidding based on a countdown timer, and basically going to war with other bidders just to snag an item is a little bit too much of a hassle for me.

You see, you basically have to buy packs of bids, each bid moving the price of the auction item up one penny. I don’t feel like doing all the homework right now to give you a list of the price of the bid packs, but needless to say, you can buy them 20 bids at a time, or 100 bids at a time, etc. for a fixed price. Once you’ve purchased your bid packs, that’s what you have to work with, and you use them to bid on these different auction items—say a Garmin GPS or something—and you’re basically in competition with other bidders to be the “highest bidder standing” when the timer runs out. The trick is, every time someone bids, the timer resets itself, and it’s almost like playing musical chairs to a degree—there’s no guarantee that you’ll have your seat when the music stops, so to speak. Have you ever seen that advertisement that says “Somebody’s gonna win the lottery—just not you.”? That’s the way I feel about Beezid. I cannot in good conscience call Beezid a scam, because they do offer full disclosure of how much their bid packs cost, how the actual auction system works, the shipping cost if you happen to win the item, etc., so it’s not that they’re engaging in deceptive practices. But, I don’t like for shopping to feel like a crap shoot or a game of roulette, just for the sake of hopefully snagging a few dollars (or even a lot of dollars) discount off an item. I would rather know what I’m going to be paying up front and agree to pay it, without the guesswork of wondering if I’m even going to be able to get the item number one, and then number two if I’m going to be satisfied with the price I paid. At least with eBay, you can set a maximum bid, which is kind of like a “stop loss” so that you know you won’t get to a point where you’re overbidding and losing money. But I can see the potential for a “mania” type attitude with this, where you want so badly to win the auction, which is not guaranteed, that you keep on buying bid packs until you’re throwing good money after bad. This is purely my opinion, and should not be taken as a slam against Beezid or an inference that Beezid is a scam, because from what I have seen they’re legit in how they run their site…I’m just not sure that I want to jump through that many hoops just to buy an item at a discount, even if it’s a big discount.