After our previous entry on Swoopo.com was tweeted automatically by Jon (via twitterfeed), he got a reply from @Swoopo asking if he would like to write a post about Swoop It Now. When he eventually saw the tweet (we were on vacation remember?), he replied and let them know that I was the author which resulted in a reply to me, followed by a reply to Jon, which brings us to the post of the day.
Basically, the premise here is that you as a user have just been bidding like crazy on an auction, but someone managed to get it out from under you. On a normal auction site this wouldn’t be as much of a problem since you wouldn’t have spent any money. However when you are paying for bids this is much more problematic.
It used to be that the money you paid for those bids was lost forever, however, you now have the option to recover that investment. Basically, they take whatever you have spent in bids and apply it to the “Worth up to” price.
I feel an example would be apropos here, so let’s take this auction. Here we see that someone won a nice shiny Nikon D90 for $146.70.
As you can see on the auction page, the winner placed 104 Bids (73 Paid + 31 Free), go him/her.
What about the other bidders? No clue, however doing some quick math on this 6 cent auction shows that a total of 2,444 bids were placed. Subtracting the 104 the winner placed leaves us with 2,340 bids that other people placed (and at a cost of 60 cents per bid that is $1,404 in other bids, presuming no other free bids). Pretend you are someone interested in this camera and you decide that this is your auction. You go all out and spend all 400 bids you just bought (for $240) on the auction, only to see that some other user managed to win instead of you.
You now have one hour from the time the auction ends to decide what you will do next.
Will you:
A) Buy some more bids and try to win another auction (potentially losing all the money and bids again)?
B) Use Swoop It Now and end up paying full price for the item, minus the $240 you already invested?
Option A is certainly tempting as you have another chance to get the camera for a lower price (possibly as low as $9.06), but if you don’t then you just spent even more money with zero return.
For any auction that you invest a significant amount of bids though, it would seem that Swoop It Now is a better option. You just put $240 towards the $1,139 camera, if you are willing to spend a further $899 right now, you can have the camera shipped out to you immediately.
Another way to look at it is like this: you have just saved up the cash to buy yourself a shiny new camera. You have been looking forward to this purchase for a while now and can’t wait to get your hands on it. Now you could just go over to your local photomart and purchase this… or you could log onto Swoopo.com and attempt to win it at auction and dedicate a set number of dollars to purchase bids with for the item. If you don’t win it at a lower price (and/or you spend all your bids), then you can always do Swoop it Now and pay the price you had already budgeted for.
What’s the downside? Well the “Worth up to” price might be higher than what you are prepared to pay and/or more than what your local photomart or Amazon would charge. What you need to decide is whether or not that is a choice you are willing to take.
Basically, Swoop It Now is a second chance to get the item you were bidding on without doing any further bidding. There isn’t really a discount to buying from Swoopo with Swoop It Now, it is just a way to recover your previous investment of paid bids (free bids don’t help at all).