April Fools: Is Swoopo Full of Something Stinky Like Poopo?
I was first introduced to Swoopo by a freelancer friend of mine telling me he wanted to bid on building a Swoopo clone on VOIS.
After admitting I never heard of it before, and upon first glance I thought it was one of the smartest innovations that has come across my desk for some time. It was so interesting to me, that I looked a little deeper into the numbers. That is where it starts getting a bit confusing. Looking to omnipotent Google for answers it became immediately evident that people thought Swoopo wasn’t kosher, as was apparent by what was under the company listing on Goole…. “Swoopo Scam.” I found a dozen pages of listings that had Swoopo and Scam, but before I go any further I need you to know what Swoopo does. This is straight from their site.
“What is Swoopo?

Swoopo – the next generation of online auctions

Founded in Germany in 2005, Swoopo is one of the world’s most innovative auction sites. Based on a unique software solution and business model, the company sells premium products like: computers, cameras, game consoles and even cars, at very low prices. Swoopo auctions over 10,000 products per month and has more than 1,200,000 registered customers.

Here is how it works: our online customers buy “bids” in advance. They cost $0.75 each and are sold in packs of 30, 50, 100, 300 or 700. Bidders have the choice of placing single bids, or, using an electronic bid assistant called the “BidButler”. Alternatively, customers can bid via the phone.
Every bid placed, increases the price of the product by 15c and the auction countdown by up to 20 seconds. To help keep track of the money spent on bidding, each auction displays the amount spent on bids by the customer and how much the bidder would save overall, if they won the auction at that moment.
The ‘last bidder standing’ when the countdown reaches zero, wins the auction – usually at a very low price; winners save, on average, 65% when compared to the recommended retail price.
In December 2007, Swoopo was successfully launched in the UK, followed by Spain in May 2008 and the US and Austria in September 2008.”
They state they have 1.2 million customers and have over 10,000 auctions per
month. From looking at the site, and having the numbers they tell us, we are left with no other option but to start thinking like Ricky Ricardo and consider that they got some splaining to do.
The items go up in $.01-$.15 increments and when you see a Sony VAIO 16” selling regularly for $975.00 and you could bid for this item under $500.00 for $.75 per bid. Quick math tells you in a penny auction that Swoopo has the potential to make a up to $.75 per bid, for 50,000 bids. That brings the total amount to Swoopo to $37,500! Not bad return on investment for a $1,000 laptop. Not to mention you have to still pay the folks at Swoopo $500 plus S&H.
Could be a good deal if you win an auction and saved ½ off for your purchase. But at $.75 a bid, you are basically buying lottery tickets and we all know there are serious rules and regulations that go along with having lotteries. These bid costs go down when you take into account that Swoopo auctions off there own bid vouchers at a discount. The more credits you buy the bigger the discount. But are they a discount if you’re paying for every bid, and you do not know who or what you are bidding against? Here is where I get very lost. Let’s say it is all true, and everything we see is clear with no person, program or bot gaming the system. How do you get around some very simple questions?
*Why is your Alexa.com 3 month average only 8,651 in the world?
*Why does it say the average person only views 4.38 pages?
To go to the site is page view #1. To click on an Item of interest is page view #2. To do anything else, like buy credits, click help, register, browse, or basically do anything else is page view #3? Then what happens, they all leave? What about the millions of bids? They say in their own words 10,000 products have been offered. They sell for average of $30.00 and up. Quick math tells me that the numbers seem skeptical to say the least. This site should have more page views, based on the amount of products and bids that are currently being placed on the site. To compare apples to apples, Ebay has an average of 14.7 page views per visit. The Swoopo numbers should by reason dwarf this Ebay number. This statement is based on the amount of bids that each product listed gets, and going up at a average of a few pennies at a time.
I then discovered you can use a bid butler. Yes, an automated robot or software program known as a bot. Swoopo provides this butler / bot for you to keep on spending your credits. How does anyone know we are bidding against a real person, a bid butler, or a house account? Simply, you don’t! Swoopo has the technology, that’s obvious because we know they have the bid butler.
Now, I am not saying that they are jacking or gaming the bids, but if someone was doing shady things how would their users ever know? Where is the transparency? Is this company audited? Is there some forum where I can contact other members and witness who won instead of seeing it was Salvy, skullpoint, and my favorite name of all was Obama. I would like to congratulate Mr. Obama on his bid and possibly shoot the breeze on my advice on how to fix all that is broken. He really should not be on Swoopo during this very difficult time, or is he?
In the end, they do call themselves an Entertainment Shopping site, what exactly does that mean? Heck, is spending a couple of bucks for the dream of owning that video game, or flat screen TV worth it? The answer is still out there. Now, if it is all on the up and up, these guys are killing it like nobody’s business. The problem is it is nobody’s business until we get some more clarity and transparency.
It reminds me when Moli.com was supposed to be the hottest new Social Commerce site and had been on the Alexa.com movers and shakers list. The site became a huge mover and was getting tons of press. Moli was ranked among the most visited sites in the world and then in 3rd quarter of 2008 the web traffic just fell off from top 500 in the world to a N/A ranking over 100,000 in the world. What happened? People in the industry speculated to us that they simply stopped buying the traffic. Whatever the real story is still a guess, but when it seemed way too good to be true it most likely was false. That is at least what the traffic graph tells us. Looks like to Moli pool sprung a leak and we still need to know if Swoopo is a pool that leaks or just another site that could be a cesspool. Please let me know your comments because I do think done right Swoopo could be one of the brightest ideas I have seen in some time.
