I love social software and interesting data.
I'm 28. I love cooking and trying new food.
I live in Brooklyn, NY Bayonne, NJ.
Contact me at david.lifson@gmail.com.
I'm the co-founder of Postling, a unified dashboard for small businesses.
It's important to me to give back to the startup community, so if you are interesting in hearing my thoughts about your startup, sign up for my office hours or send me an email.
My other sites:
Mark Gimein at Slate
Consider the MacBook Pro that Swoopo sold on Sunday for that $35.86. Swoopo lists its suggested retail price at $1,799; judging by the specs, you can actually get a similar one online from Apple (AAPL) for $1,349, but let’s not quibble. Either way, it’s a heck of a discount. But now look at what the bidding fee does. For each “bid” the price of the computer goes up by a penny and Swoopo collects 60 cents. To get up to $35.86, it takes, yes, an incredible 3,585 bids, for each of which Swoopo gets its fee. That means that before selling this computer, Swoopo took in $2,151 in bidding fees. Yikes.
In essence, what your 60-cent bidding fee gets you at Swoopo is a ticket to a lottery, with a chance to get a high-end item at a ridiculously low price. With each bid the auction gets extended for a few seconds to keep it going as long as someone in the world is willing to take just one more shot. This can go on for a very, very long time. The winner of the MacBook Pro auction bid more than 750 times, accumulating $469.80 in fees.
Ha, yeah. Swoopo is not a new site (in Internet years), but certainly clever (or devious) in it’s business model.
