Dubli.com closed zero-auction, finally

Dubli.com had three options for the customers:
- X-price Auction, which they name Xpress (don't know why - this type of an auction is much slower if to compare with penny auction),
- Unique Bid - unique lowest bid auction,
- Zero Auction.

This was an explanation of zero-auction from dubli.com website:
"Dubli will list an item up for auction at the lowest possible price on the internet. In fact the Dubli price guarantee; guarantees the starting price of every item to be the lowest on the internet, or Dubli will refund the difference plus another 10%. if you find the same product at a lower price with in two weeks of your purchase.

In order to reveal the most current price you must spend one Dubli credit which cost eighty cents to reveal the current price. Every time the price is revealed by a Dubli customer the price of the product drops in increments of twenty five cents until the price of the product falls zero. In order to be the awarded winning bidder you must clicks to reveal the final price which drops the final price from twenty five cents to zero. It’s that simple!"

Not a smart idea. In reverse X-price auction you can buy the product every time, when you bid and price became open. In zero-auction you should wait when the joint efforts bring the price to zero.
Not a surprise, that they had to close this section, obviously due to lack of visitors.

Swopo clone - penny auction appellative name

We ask our potential customers - please don't send to us e-mails like the following:
"Please send us info reg. your Swoopo clone software and access to a demo. Thanks".

We don't produce any Swoopo clone, Swoopo type or Swoopo like software! The name of our software product is penny auction software, initially it was "Cent auction software", because first penny auction was made in Germany.

Swoopo is a trademark of Entertaiment Shopping AG, who owns Swoopo named websites, like swoopo.de, swoopo.com and swoopo.co.uk.

Other producers of penny auction software, like our company Softmedia, are not connected with this company and this trademark.

Telebid script feature "Never make a loss"

Some penny auction scripts provide among features so-called 'riskless' functionality. The logic is easy: if auction has not collected enough bids, it cannot finish. Usually this means that it is extended by adding 'fake' bid. So, timer is reset and real clients must bid once more.

Though this functionality might seem to be very attractive for auction owners, we strongly not advise to use it.

First of all, this is outright deception of clients. According to the rules, if time is run out, client should become a winner. But in case of 'riskless' auction client does not. So, the rules are violated. The solution would be to rewrite rules so that clients would know that they cannot win until the auction receives a minimal amount of bids. But it is easy to predict that nobody would bid at auction knowing about such 'warm-up constraint'.

Secondly, our experience is that it is easy to discover if auction is 'riskless'. If you see that some client (or even several clients) is constantly bidding at last second on many different items then you should suspect dishonest game. Real clients usually do not bid on all the items at the very last second.

To sum up, 'riskless' functionality is both unfair and noticeable. It may discredit the auction and cause complaints to consumer protection bureau.


Advice to penny auction clients.
If you find a new penny auction and want to start bidding, it is good to find out who is the author of the software at first. When you know the software manufacturer, check that they do not offer cheating software features to their customers.

If you see that the auction may cheat you or you cannot find the software author, we advise you not to bid at this auction.