Talking to a friend the other day about penny auction sites the first thing out of his mouth was something like:
“Man, that Skore it is a scam! Those gift cards you see them auctioning off for twenty cents end up costing you way more than that, you have to pay money just to place a bid!”
Well, duh.
Yes, you have to pay money to place a bid, that is in the basics of how penny auctions work. If you do not understand the fundamentals of what you are getting into then of course penny auctions look like a scam. If you do not know how they work then the entire business model penny auction sites are built around looks like a scam. It would mean that there are literally no legit penny auctions on the internet. Well, that is wrong. They are a solid list of high quality, trustworthy and legit penny auction sites that you can feel safe bidding at.
For the record, SkoreIt is not a scam penny auction, they are one of the good guys, one of the legit penny auction sites where play a strategic bidding game called a penny auction.
Our Favorite Legit Penny Auction Sites
[geocode id=1]Not Understanding The Way Penny Auction Sites Work
Here is how penny auctions work in a nutshell.
- Auction participants must purchase and use ‘bids’ in order to compete in the game of penny auction.
- Bids cost around $0.60 each. Once you click the ‘bid button’ you spend one of these bids.
- Spending a bid does 3 things. It increases the auction price by 1 penny, it adds a certain amount of seconds on the count down clock and it moves you (your bidder name) to the ‘current winner’ status. IE you are the top bidder
- If you are the last bidder before the clock reaches zero then you win!
The above is a simplified version of how penny auction sites work. Click through to the link to read through our penny auctions 101 guide that covers a more in depth look at penny auctions from a newbies perspective, or dive in deeper with our advanced winning penny auction strategy.
Legit Bidding Sites
Keep in mind there is a big difference between legit penny auction sites and safe penny auctions. I like to define a legit penny auction site as one that does not use shill bidders of any kind and 100% of bids are placed by real people, that ships faithfully the items listed and that actively fights against bidder collusion or any other sort of bidder cheating.
Safe penny auctions are everything that a legit site is however when I hear people ask me for a safe site, I think a ‘Low Risk Penny Auction’. I define a low risk penny auction site as one like BidRivals. The reason for this is because they are 100% legit (honest / trusted etc) AND 100% of their auction offer a feature that is called “Buy It Now”. What this feature does is allow you to place the full retail value of the bids you spent trying to win an auction towards purchasing the item from the site themselves directly. This type of penny auction is both ‘legit’ and ‘safe’.
Compare this to a site like Beezid or Skoreit where the auctions do not have a buy it now feature attached and you can see the difference between legit sites that I would not classify as ‘safe’ or ‘low risk’. Beezid and SkoreIt are both high risk, and high reward. However, SkoreIt has recently started adding a large number of ‘buy it now’ auctions.
