Website: Swoopo
Entertainment Shopping AG
Domagkstrasse 34
Muenchen, Denmark 80807
MVoigt@swoopo.com
Domain Registered: July 2008
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Swoopo, undeniably has the largest selection of items of any penny auction on the web. They are in multiple countries and are considered the penny auction heavyweight titan. If you want it, Swoopo has it on auction, with about 200 items on auction at any given time, a crafty bidder has the chance to take home a great deal if they have the patience. Winning or Losing depends on the bidders skill of auction price and time negotiation. There are many people who have won and who have lost on swoopo, but one thing is sure the more time you spend bidding on the auctions and acclimating yourself to swoopos bidding procedures, your skill in auction price and time negotiation should improve dramatically.
Update: 4/24/10
In the world of online penny auction sites, Swoopo is regarded by many as the king. Established in 2005 in Germany, Swoopo is widely considered as the first ever online penny auction website to use the bidding system other auction sites use today. The site claims to have auctioned off 200,000 items since its establishment 5 years ago. As to how many of those auctions were legitimate remains to be seen.
Swoopo also claims to have over 2,000,000 registered customers – something that’s very likely, given its global presence in the market.
Because of the site’s worldwide reach, bidding competition at Swoopo is nothing short of fierce. The penny auction site has an immensely vast array of products. Think of any electronic device or home appliance, chances are, Swoopo has it. At any given point in time, the site has over 50 ongoing live auctions; that’s one of—if not—the most any penny auction has to offer.
It’s worth noting that depending on your location, the site you’re using is only a local portal for the global Swoopo network. For example, typing in Swoopo.com results in Swoopo.co.uk if you’re in the United Kingdom. Now since the site’s servers are located in Germany, US-based bidders might experience timer lags, making it annoyingly hard to bid at an auction.
And as if that’s not enough of a factor to lessen your chances of winning, remember that you’re bidding against thousands of live bidders, so don’t expect to win anything. Indeed, it takes some major skillz to be effective at Swoopo.
One issue plaguing Swoopo is the alleged use of bidding bots that go against registered users. Swoopo denies this of course, but there’s no way of really being sure when it comes to online penny auctions.
Penny Auction
(4.43 out of 5)
Powerbidder
on 14 Jun 2010 at 7:14 pm
Best of the penny auction sites for big ticket items.
Shay
on 25 Nov 2010 at 10:45 pm
I used to bid on Swoopo for nearly a year and then they allowed the entire site to be overtaken by a large group of bidders that worked together to win auctions. Once other people saw this large group working together then others began using the same techniques and Swoopo did absolutely nothing to stop it from happening, in fact their customer service basically just blew me off until I threatened to spread the cheating technique around the internet so at least everyone who bid on the site would have the same level playing field. After six months of reporting the cheaters every time I saw them cheating they finally escalated me to Jehnna Koch who is the supposed customer service manager at Swoopo. She took the list of users that I provided her that were cheating and she closed some of the accounts for fraud, only to have a number of them reopened inexplicably by the German office. I found this suspicious and began to think these accounts were actually Swoopo accounts, but it wasn’t until they began questioning how I knew people were cheating that I became fully convinced that Swoopo is a scam site that either bids on their own auctions or that one of their German employees has a group of friends that they work with to win auctions. When they asked me how I could verify if people were cheating I explained that everytime a bidder reset their bid butler it would go off so it was easy to tell when they were turning it on and off to allow the single bidder they were working with to win the auction. The next day the bid butler was changed so a bid would no longer go off. I thought this was either a very strange coincidence or they changed their system so I could no longer tell when people were cheating. I thought I would test my theory that they were involved so when Jehnna the customer service manager asked me how it was that I was able to provide them with lists of auction numbers and people who were involved in the auctions I explained that I would search Google for the bidder names so I could see what auctions certain bidders would be on together, showing that they were working together because there would be a long list of auctions that would come up in the search. I figured by telling them this if the auctions no longer showed up when I did a Google search it would confirm that Swoopo was in fact making changes on their end to assist the cheaters and make it more difficult for me to know when people are cheating. It wasn’t a week after I told them about my Google search technique that the auctions were no longer showing up on Google, reinforcing my belief that they are involved with the cheating on their website. There continues to be a large number of individuals who cheat on auctions at Swoopo, and even though I have provided them with a large number of auctions showing the overlap and collusion of bidders and somehow this isn’t sufficient to prove cheating to Jehnna Koch. Swoopo is a shady business and their business practices are highly questionable and unethical. If you want to see for yourself just watch the bidding techniques of Millionerxxl, Katze1963, Mudviking, angryenough, Kazanan, Bigmamaxxl, Assb76, I could go on and on. They all work together to win by having one person have the bid butler and then one single bidder bidding later and later at 1 second. Eventually others will stop bidding because they think the single bidder is going to continue bidding at 1 second and when they don’t the bid butler wins. Watch how late people bid at one second – that’s the dead give away. The other tactic is to have the bid butler and then have a single bid as well and then they shut the bid butler off letting the single bidder win. Their tactics are constantly evolving so you just have to watch and pay close attention to bid patterns. When you are skilled enough you can see it from a mile away. Unless you are Swoopo – they have no idea, mostly because they only look at data. None of them even know a thing about the auctions and they don’t have anybody even watch the auctions as they are going live. I highly recommend finding a different penny auction site, as Swoopo is very questionable and is getting worse all the time. In my opinion the site is a total scam, but that is just my experience.