[UnFundedHype]

The whole tech culture is also to blame. I'm sure there have been a LOT of great alternate ebay, paypal start ups who just didn't get traction. Bloggers won't talk about you if you haven't raised a million and you won't get much traction on google without bloggers or spending major bucks.

My Dreamybids.com site for example, is an awesome service that uses the quibids model. It allows anyone to host their own auctions for products or services. Meaning a graphic designer could auction $200 of services. 10 people pay $20 to participate in the auction, one person wins and gets $200 of graphic design for $20.

Good luck getting traction with that if you aren't in the tech crunch, mashables, stanford, in club.

[lumberjack]

>10 people pay $20 to participate in the auction

That doesn't seem like an auction and to be honest I don't really like the idea either.

[UnFundedHype]

Then you are part of the innovation problem. You could be the one auctioning a service instead.

[paupino_masano]

It doesn't really sound like an auction - more like a raffle. i.e. If 10 people pay $20 but only one wins it...

I actually looked at making a site like this for selling my house a couple of years ago. Fortunately I did some analysis before building it as in NZ it came under the gambling commission rules. This meant that I could only build a site like this if I donated all the proceeds to charity - unfortunately that was against what I was trying to achieve so never went through with it.

[DenisM]

This the kind of "innovation" rather similar to lottery, and I would rather it did not exist at all.

[dusing]

That's not an auction, that is a lottery, a raffle basically.

[FireBeyond]

It is, and in most US states, is heavily regulated, something I don't see addressed by the OP (who in another post makes some veiled reference to Real Money Trading of in-game currencies, another "sketchy" industry).

[TheAmazingIdiot]

Quibids is one of the scammy-iest "auction" site abound. It's name is called Penny-Scam Auction

The gist for those that do now know: you buy bid-packs. A bid costs .60$, per BID. This doesn't matter if you "win" the item. If you do "win" (gamification abound), then you pay what the bid was brought up to. The other scam-note is that bids increase usually by $.01 so you see shit like "XYZ WON AN IPAD FOR 2.73$ !!!". While in reality, the "winner" pays $2.73+$40 in bids, along with everyone else to get the permission to bid.

If you type in quibids in google, the top auto-fill is SCAM. Just go look it up.

Btw UnFundedHype: I hope your scam of a business fails, and fails hard. You know better than this shit.

[UnFundedHype]

I can get just as many links for ebay and craigslist "scams"

It's no different than a gaming tournament where you pay a $10 entry fee.

You'd keep yourself from popping a vein if you just asked how does yours prevent the headaches of quibids.

Everything I didn't like about quibids I removed from dreamybids.

1. There are plenty of ways to get free bids, you don't even have to buy 1 bid.

2. One of the auction formats, everyone in the auction gets x amount of free bids. Each bid the final price goes up x amount of cents. At the end of the auction the winner pays the final price, if you didn't win the auction it costs you nothing since you never bought bids. Like this free auction http://www.dreamybids.com/contest.php?id=332

3. You can host your own auctions. So even if you did lose $50 in bids, put up an item of your own and make your money back. If we collect 30% more than the retail price of the item, you'd get 50% of the overage, so you can make way more than you would from selling an item on ebay or craigslist.

4. There are some great gamification tools that allow you to freeze the bid of the next bidder, or buy the timer down, or block a power bidder from joining an auction. Also once the auction starts new participants can't jump in.

Asking questions keeps you from being theamazingidiot