Tips for Busy People

Did you ever want to shop on DealDash.com but you were just too busy? 

Of course, it is best to shop on DealDash when we have at least two to four hours of free time and can watch the auctions closely without any outside distractions. However, that is not always possible.

Therefore, I decided to put together some shopping tips for other busy people like myself. We can still shop on DealDash and win auctions even when we do not have the time to watch them. Let’s take a look at some ways we can do that.

Lots of Bids

Let’s say we recently purchased or won an auction for a lot of bids so we have plenty of bids to burn.

This should make winning easy even when we will be too busy to watch the auction. All we have to do is take a few minutes to choose an auction that we want to win, open the auction and look at the list of previous 10 winners. If we place the same number of bids as the previous highest bidder we will most likely win the auction.

For example, I once saw an auction that was won for 100 bids or less five times, 200 bids or less two times, 300 bids or less two times and 500 bids one time. I decided to place one bid higher than the highest number of bids all previous winners placed in that auction. After placing 501 bids, I walked away and shopped for groceries, mowed my lawn and did my laundry. When I returned to my computer to check the auction, I could hardly believe what I saw. I had won the auction on my very last bid. Had I not placed one extra bid over the highest number of bids the previous winner used I would not have won the auction. I was saved by that one extra bid.

I learned that it is always better to place too many bids than not enough. We never have to worry about placing too many bids because if we win an auction for fewer bids all of the extra bids will automatically go back into our account.

Not Many Bids

Let’s say we only have 300 bids and we would like to use those bids to win more bids, but we don’t have time to watch the auctions. That would make winning a bid pack a little more difficult, but not impossible.

I know because I did it. On July 14 I placed 3 to 11 bids into BidBuddy on several auctions that had not yet started and I walked away to fold laundry, make dinner and attend a meeting. When I returned to my computer to check the DealDash auctions I was happy to see that I won a 200 bid pack using only 3 bids and a selling price of 5 cents.

The lesson I learned here is that if we place a low number of bids in several auctions we can win if just one of the auctions sells early. Of course, sometimes several auctions sell early and sometimes fewer auctions will sell early. However, it is nearly guaranteed that every day at least a few auctions will sell early. It’s simply a matter of being in the right auction at the right time.

For example, we could use 300 bids by placing 20 bids in 15 auctions or 10 bids in 30 auctions or 5 bids in 60 auctions. We could place our bids in random auctions or we could browse categories, click on bid packs and place our bids on nothing but more bids. If we placed 5 bids on 60 bid packs do you think at least one of them would sell early?

Some shoppers place from 3 to 30 bids at the beginning of every auction and then quit. They may not win very often using this method because other shoppers will usually outbid them. Nonetheless, enough auctions close early that it might be surprising how many auctions these shoppers actually win using a minimal number of bids.

Whenever players do win using this method they always have a very low selling price, too, so this can be a very smart way to play.

This sponsored blog post was submitted by: Barbara L. Sellers. Barbara was compensated by DealDash for this blog post. Blog posts are written by real DealDash customers. The opinions and advice here represent our customers’ views and not those of the company.

Back to School

It’s that time of year again when parents must now do some back to school shopping, but where should you start?

Look no farther! DealDash.com could be the perfect place to find some of the items on your back to school shopping list.

If you are looking for a computer or electronic tablet, a printer, high-quality ink pens, a high-tech calculator, a microscope for the student who loves science, or something as simple as a 6-inch ruler, you are in the right place. You can find all of these items on DealDash!

To highlight back to school shopping days, DealDash has created several special bid packs that come in 123, 246, 369, 456, 789 and 1,000. These back to school bid packs will be available beginning today, July 26, through Friday, July 30.

It would be awesome to win each and every one of these special bid pack auctions, but we must remember they are limited to one each per customer.

Since we are on the topic of back to school, I thought it would be fun to look up some public school history on google.

Brief Public School History

Did you know the first public school in America was established on April 23, 1635, in Boston, Massachusetts, when our country was still a British colony? It wasn’t until 1852 that Massachusetts also became the first state to enact a compulsory law that required every city and town to offer primary school focusing on grammar and basic arithmetic.

According to an article from Wikipedia, in those days “generally public schooling in rural areas did not extend beyond elementary (eighth grade). After 1900, some cities began to establish high schools primarily for middle class whites. In the 1930s roughly one-fourth of the United States population still lived and worked on farms and few rural Southerners of either race (blacks or whites) went beyond eighth grade until 1945.”

I was surprised to learn that it would have been rare for either one of my parents (who were born in 1912 and 1916) to go to school beyond eighth grade because a high school education was not yet commonly available to them.

Interesting IQ Facts

Did you know that the average IQ in the United States is 98?  Some sources say it is 100 but most sources say it is 98. According to my search on Google, most people have an IQ between 85 and 115 and “only a small fraction of people have a very low IQ below 70 or a very high IQ above 130.” 

I found it interesting to learn that people with an IQ from 115 to 129 are considered mildly gifted, people with an IQ from 130 to 144 are considered to be moderately gifted and people with an IQ from 145 to 159 are considered to be highly gifted. I took an IQ test several years ago and my score put me in the “moderately gifted” category. Do you know what your IQ is?

Regardless, at least we are all smart enough to shop on DealDash.com. I hope you enjoy your back to school shopping, and I’ll see you there!

This sponsored blog post was submitted by: Barbara L. Sellers. Barbara was compensated by DealDash for this blog post. Blog posts are written by real DealDash customers. The opinions and advice here represent our customers’ views and not those of the company.

Popular New Products

Wow! Have you taken a look at some of the newest products on DealDash.com?

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular new items – a hydroponic system for year ‘round gardening and a portable air conditioner.

Year ‘Round Gardening

One popular new product is a hydroponic system for growing our own vegetables and herbs. This mini indoor garden has 512 DealDash shoppers bidding on it as of this writing. Evidently, a mini garden that will grow up to 24 herbs, veggies and flowers year ‘round is something many people would love to get. Just imagine how nice it would be to have our own little garden at our fingertips.

This garden allows plants to grow in water (not soil) five times faster than outdoor plants. Veggies can grow up to 36 inches high. It uses an average of 126 watts and based on 11 cents per kilowatt hour means it would cost about $7.30 a month. What’s even more amazing is that this indoor mini-garden uses grow lights and can even be cared for using Wi-Fi controls.

I took growing veggies for granted because I grew up on a large organic farm where I helped to plant and pull weeds from a 1,000 square foot garden. It was a lot of hard work and I never thought I would ever miss it. However, I now know how awesome it would be to grown my own vegetables.

Portable air conditioner

The first new item that caught my attention was the portable air conditioner and it also caught the attention of 513 other DealDash shoppers who are bidding on it now. Do you know why?

I would be willing to bet that many of these bidders are most likely residents of the Pacific Northwest where I live. We recently got hit with a very unusual heat wave and only half of the residents in this area have air conditioning in our homes. That’s because the temperature rarely gets above 80 degrees in our summer months, so we were completely unprepared when the temperature got up to 111 degrees Fahrenheit for a few days.

I feel lucky that my computer room is located downstairs where it stays much cooler because it is below ground level. After surviving the recent hot spell, however, many of us are now looking at the possibility of investing in getting an air conditioner.

I never before saw a portable air conditioner but I really like the idea of having one that I would be able to move from room to room. This conditioner, which stands 28 inches high, can cool a room up to 350 square feet.  It has 8,000 BTU (DOE Standard)/13,000 BTU (ASHRAE Standard) and has a LCDI power cord with a three-prong grounded plug that uses an 115V electrical outlet. For more specific details you can read the description the next time it comes up for auction on DealDash.

With so many DealDash shoppers bidding on these new items, it might be difficult to win an auction immediately. However, these two items might be a great time to use BIN.

This sponsored blog post was submitted by: Barbara L. Sellers. Barbara was compensated by DealDash for this blog post. Blog posts are written by real DealDash customers. The opinions and advice here represent our customers’ views and not those of the company.

Bid Exchanges

Have you done any bid exchanges on DealDash.com?

Here’s how bid exchanges work. When we win an auction on DealDash and go to pay for the auction, we will usually receive an option of either paying for the sale price of the auction product or exchanging it for bids free of charge instead. The number of bids we could receive in exchange for the product we won is based on the value of the BIN.

Why Do a Bid Exchange

You might wonder why anyone would want to do a bid exchange. Why would bidders place bids on an auction product in the first place for something they did not really want? That’s a good question. There are actually many reasons why the bid exchange option could work to our advantage. Let’s take a look at some of those reasons:

  • Perhaps the auction closed at a much higher sale price than what we initially wanted to pay for the product. We don’t have to pay the sale price if we exchange the product for bids. Of course, we could still end up losing more than we gain if we overbid the value of the product.
  • Another reason we might opt to do a bid exchange is because we might notice that we won a product that was the wrong size. For example, we might have needed a large jacket and noticed it was only a size medium. In that case we might be better off doing a bid exchange so we could apply the bids to try to win the right sized jacket in another auction.
  • A third reason we might want to do a bid exchange is because we are focused on increasing the number of bids we have in our account. In that case, we might bid in an auction that looks like it is easy to win even if we know the product is the wrong size and/or we know the product is not really something we want. For example, we might see a ring that is only a size 6 and maybe the competition is extra low because not many customers wear a ring that small or we might see an auction that has less than 10 people bidding and we only decide to place bids in that auction because it looks like an easy win.

Our competitors might not have recently won a big bid pack, but if any of our competitors have recently won several other auctions we never know if they did a bid exchange, so we should always keep that in mind. By using the bid exchange option we might be able to save enough bids to compete and win another auction that might be more difficult to win.

This sponsored blog post was submitted by: Barbara L. Sellers. Barbara was compensated by DealDash for this blog post. Blog posts are written by real DealDash customers. The opinions and advice here represent our customers’ views and not those of the company.