Q and A on Penny Auction Software #9

Q. I have a friend who’s looking to buy a penny auction script. Will I be compensated in any way if I refer him to you?

A. We highly value cases when people go out of their way and help us spread the word about Softmedia by recommending our products and services. To be able to give something back to our supporters we run an in-house Affiliate program.

Affiliate program members who use their affiliate links to refer people to our site are compensated for every sale traced back to them.

So if your friend will purchase our software after arriving via your personal affiliate link we can trace that sale to you and we’ll gladly compensate your efforts.

You can apply to become an affiliate at: http://www.softmedia.biz/affiliate_programs

If you know someone looking for a penny auction script, just apply for our Affiliate program, copy your personal affiliate link and send it to them via email.

Q and A on Penny Auction Software #8

Q. Are any of the major penny auction sites making any money at all like Quibids, Beezid or Dealdash? Or are any sites at all in the whole penny auction world making a profit vs. losing every day?

A. It’s true that that penny auctions are not magical money-making machine however those who treat their business seriously manage to make it profitable.
The sad truth of the industry is that for every 100 half-baked websites there is just 1 produced and operated professionally, and this fact distorts the real potential of a solid business opportunity. 

There is a simple check list for anyone with a serious approach to penny auctions and making them profitable:

• Use reliable software (remeber that penny auction is a high-load real-time software application and you need it operational at all times - the instant it goes down is the instant when you start to lose money);
• Be fair to your customers;
• Draw a lot of traffic and convert visitors in to happy bidding clients is key;
• Do not forget why your customers come to your website.

A great example of profitable and professional penny auction that maintains the reputation of the industry is QuiBids.com:

• Launched in late 2009
• Over 130 staff employees
• Over 450,000+ closed auctions

You can also have a look at the interview with Matt Beckham, President/CEO for QuiBids: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar98hhrAry8

Penny auctions have potential for quite rapid growth, and when you look at examples where people take their business seriously things look optimistic, don’t they?

Lokuaz.com 1 year anniversary

One year old and holding a competent lead on the Mexican penny auction market, Softmedia congratulates Lokuaz.com with getting pass this important milestone and wishes them further success.

Hundreds of finished auctions with a personal story behind every happy winner, Lokuaz have shown that they have a firm understanding of their client’s wishes and passions when providing great experience.

They are a pleasure to work with and not afraid to set a challenge when pushing their game to the next level, Softmedia is happy to continue our work together providing them the best technical tools that help them keep ahead of the market.

Bid-Stop.com successfully started

An international penny auction www.Bid-Stop.com started now.

The owners have big plans for Bid-Stop future and to show us that they mean business lots of hot items are being offered: iPad 3, iPhones 4S and more. Be there first and beat the rush, while competition is still low you can win amazing prizes with mere pennies.

First iPad3 has found its owner already - the winner is user Traumfängerin, seems like from Germany :) The final price - 3.30. Not much for the brand new iPad.

Good luck bidding!

Responsible penny auction software development

When making or buying penny auction software you need to know general principles of responsible software development.
In a post for Penny Auction Watch, our colleague Anthony recommends some important aspects that developers should take a look at.
To read the post...

Q and A on Penny Auction Software #7

Q. Can you tell me how many users can the software handle?

A. Firstly we would like to explain to our readers why it is really difficult to give an answer to this question with one exact number.

Namely, your future penny auction system will consist of 5 main components:

• auction software;
• auction website content;
• system (server) software;
• hardware (server or servers itself);
• network equipment.

As an example of the factors, that should be taken in consideration when we speak about the capacity, we would like to bring a recommendations on how to test Drupal software (Drupal – free e-shop software) from the website www.tag1consulting.com:

“1. Test in a realistic configuration
When load testing your website, even if you're only interested in some specific new code that you have written or downloaded, it's wise to simulate your actual configuration as much as possible. This includes being sure that the versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP and Drupal running on your test server(s) is the same as what is on your production server(s). Also try to use as similar a configuration for each as possible, including enabling the same Apache modules, allocating the same size of MySQL buffers, enabling the same PHP options, and enabling the same Drupal modules.”

The same principles work with penny auction software – different server, different installation of server software, different set of software modules will give absolutely different results.

“2. Testing with realistic data
Ideally, load in a very recent snapshot of your real website's database tables into your development database. If you instead test with a subset of your real data or with automatically generated data, you may end up optimizing the wrong things. This is especially important if testing out code that involves making SQL queries.”

Smart – difference in the size of website content will definitely give a different result.

“3. Logged-in users versus anonymous visitors
When you enable Drupal's page cache, much of the work involved in serving pages is optimized away for anonymous visitors. This is not true for logged-in user's, so it's important to simulate both types of user's. Furthermore, on some websites different Roles can put a very different load on your servers, so be sure to include to test with all of your roles”.

Etc. There are several more recommendations, but we aren’t discussing about the testing here.

So, what is the answer to the question above?

The general recommendation is the following – tell us what you need and we will tell you what system do you need from us.

Feel free to send us your suggestions and questions to blog@softmedia.biz