Penny Auction Terms – Dictionary & Glossary

The following terms are used in the penny auction world and come with the term and a quick definition of what the term means and any synonyms.

Shill bidder – a shill is someone who is not a bona fide bidder. A shill bidder can be either a real person placing a bid manually (but who is employed by the company and bidding with free bids) or a script that is designed to bid automatically given a set of criteria.

Bot – specifically a computer script that is designed to bid at a specific time, usually at the last moment. Bot’s can either be used by a scam penny auction site or by bidders using illegal third party bidding software.

Single Bidder – someone who clicks the bid button each time to place a bid instead of using the auto-bidding feature.

Auto-Bidder – the feature on a penny auction site that allows you to automatically bid on an auction given the parameters you set. Known as the bid agent, bid butler, bid-o-matic and generally referred to as an auto bidder this tool places bids on your behalf.

BIN – stands for “Buy It Now”. If a site has a BIN feature it means that you can apply the value of the spent bids trying to win an auction towards the purchase price of the item from the penny auction site. This means that all of your money is not lost if you bid and lose an auction. You have the choice to buy it now, discounting the amount of money you spent on bids from the price of the item. This is also known as ‘buy one now’ or a ‘buy now’ program.

Going to BIN – this means bidding enough bids to pay the BIN price trying to win the auction. This is also known as ‘binning it’, paying retail, bidding retail etc. To calculate how many bids it takes to ‘go to BIN’ you divide the retail price by the value of each of your bids.

Jumpers – known as someone who starts bidding into the auction well after a current bidder has invested a significant amount of bids towards the auction already. Jump in late and try to steal the auction for as few bids as possible.

Getting Jumped – After investing a large amount of bids towards an auction, another bidder jumps in and spends a lot of bids against you.

Tagging an Auction (or Stamping) – Being the initial bidder who claims dominance on an auction shortly after it opens. This usually means a bidding skirmish with other people who want to bid on this auction. This is also known as stamping an auction.

Tag Battle – The initial bid skirmishes between two or more bidders to determine who is going to be the lead bidder during the count down phase of the auction. Generally tag battles are smaller bursts of bids to let other bidders know you want this auction and not huge drawn out wars for items, which are more likely to occur after a tag battle is over and the auction is underway.

Going Twice Bidding – also known as last second bidding. This is the act of manually clicking the bid button at the last second possible in order to make the competition to spend as many bids as possible in order to win. This is a strategic play that tells your enemies that if they do aggressively bid against you, you are willing to strategically be a going twice bidder to make the competition extended hundreds if not thousands of bids and effectively “bring the pain”. If your competition knows that you will going twice bid them, they are much less likely to aggressively target you or your auctions.

Playing Defense – this is bidding to extend the auction and keep someone else from winning instead of bidding trying to win the auction yourself. Being a “Going Twice Bidder” is playing defense.

Snipe Bidding – this phrase is mostly associated with a product called Auction Sniper that was designed for ebay. This tool would find auctions about to end that met certain criteria like no competition or low bids and bid on them at the last second for you, keeping the ebay auction price as low as possible. In the penny auction world it generally means someone who bids last second in some auctions and tries to win an auction with just a few bids. This is common if the site has a BIN option and the lead bidder is nearing BIN… the snipers start shooting bids, or sniping an auction.

Hand Off – This is a term when two bidders collude with one another with one bidder handing the auction off to another bidder to take over bidding on a pre-determined time.

Filling Your Slots – Penny auction sites have win limits and if you fill your slots means you have won as many auctions as you can for a set amount of time. This could be auctions in total or certain types of auctions for a certain time period.

Power Bidder – a power bidder is a bidder who has previously established that they will bid an extremely high amount of times in order to win. Becoming a power bidder is a penny auction strategy that those with deep pockets can develop in order to overpay in the beginning in order to get incredible deals down the road.

Lurker – someone who just watches an auction and does not bid.

Imposter – someone who replicates another bidder trying to use their reputation. Example: A bidder with a great reputation may be known as WINBIGTIME. The “imposter” may create a username WINBIGTIM3 in hopes that no one will notice he/she is not the bidder with the great reputation.

Bid Throttling – this means bidding quickly against the other bidders. As soon as anyone out bids you, you bid again putting yourself back on top. This can be a strategic play to intimidate your competition into using fewer bids against you than if you let them be the count down bidder thinking they have a chance to win before you last second bid them.

Bid Collector – someone who focuses on winning bid packs as a big part of their strategy and building up a large volume of bids. Also known as BC’s for short, bid collectors spend many of their win slots each month bidding on and trying to win bid packs. These bidders are also referred to as bid hoarders or bid hogs or bid pack collectors.

If you know of a term, slang, saying or lingo used in the penny auction world, or if you want to coin your own term please submit your details using our contact form. Please provide a word or phrase plus definition! Thanks PennyAuctionSites.com