St Patricks Day “Free Auction Win” Special On DealDash

Deal Dash gives us the chance for a really great bargain especially when they have a ‘Free Sale’ like this year’s St. Patricks Day Special!

The opportunity to acquire an item you want for only a penny plus the cost of your bids may be too good to pass. However, you MUST consider the cost of the bids you use to be sure you do not exceed the retail value of the item. As an example:

Saturday March 15th, a lovely Tiffany Modern Lamp came up for auction at noon. The bidding closed after 12 hours and the winning bidder would have paid $51.70 if not for the free weekend. He used 1,037 bids to win. Let’s do the math using $.16 as the bid cost.

Retail Value: $151.00

Out of Pocket: $0.01
Bid cost: 1,037@ .16 = 165.92
Winners cost $165.93

Potential Loss: $14.93

The reason this is a “potential loss” is because it’s possible for bidders to earn many free bids such as collecting time as highest bidder rewards and up to 300 Free Bids every single week simply by posting pictures of their other wins. The winner may have also recently won a Bid Pack therefore does not value each of their bids at 16¢ per bid.

If this had not been a ‘free’ weekend and he paid the final auction price, it would have been 34% of the retail, if he had to use the same number of bids, his potential loss would have been $66.63. Not a good outcome. The winner was also a bidder that had been in the thick of bidding from the start. With the time and effort plus the number of bids used to acquire the lamp, it does not make this a great deal.

Even with the joy of not paying more than a penny out of pocket you still have to be sure you do not overbid. Nothing is a bargain if you over-pay. This is why I am very careful when bidding on these specials days. In fact I often sit out the entire ‘Free’ period and wait to pay when I win.

So the moral of this story is ‘Count your bids like money and make sure you do not exceed the retail value of the item you are bidding on’.