Category: Strategies and Tips

Sometimes you end up going deep in an auction and don’t come out as the winner in the end. Here’s five uplifting and encouraging facts that might help you to think positive:

Fact No. 1

We can win auctions using only 1 bid. In fact, it recently happened to me.

I was so surprised to see on March 16, I won a 750 bid pack for only 1 bid and 13 cents. I admit it does not happen very often. I think it was the best win I ever had on a bid pack. I have seen other DealDash shoppers win deals like that every once in a while but it did not seem real until it happened to me.

Fact No. 2

Very few shoppers place more than one bid in the beginning of an auction. Most shoppers place only one bid in the beginning of auctions so they will not get locked out and they plan to come back later to place more bids and seriously compete for the win.

This can work to our advantage if we only have a limited number of bids. Perhaps if we open several bid packs and place from 3 to 7 bids on each, one of them could close early and we could slip through the cracks and win.

Fact No. 3

Shoppers get locked out for at least 30 days after winning an auction and that includes those shoppers with an endless number of bids. Once they win and get locked out from the competition it is easier for the rest of us to win with a limited number of bids.

If we look at the list of previous winners we can see who already won and is no longer able to compete in that auction. We can make our bids count more if we wait patiently for certain auctions to open after the power bidders are gone.

Continue reading “Think Positive”

Would you like to get a DealDash.com Facebook photo published?

All we have to do is submit a photo of ourselves with any auction product we won. If the item value is $200 or more we earn 200 free bids. If the item value is less than $200 we will earn 100 free bids.

To help everyone get motivated I decided to write this blog about how to take awesome photos that will grab everyone’s attention.

Get Help

Perhaps the first thing we should do is to get another person to help us because it can be rather difficult to take a good “selfie.” Taking our own photos with a cell phone seldom turns out as well as it should because we are rather limited trying to pose and take the photo at the same time.  

If we have another person to take the photo for us, we might come up with a much better result. I’m sure most of us can think of at least one friend or neighbor who can take fairly good photos.

Focus

The last thing we want is to take a fuzzy photo that is not in focus. Most cameras today have a setting that is specifically for automatic focus. However, we might have to press the shutter button down only part way and pause a few seconds to allow the camera to make its automatic adjustment before we press the button down all the way to take the photo.

Before taking the actual photo we plan to submit, it might be a good idea to take some practice shots, too.

Lighting

While taking our practice photos it is a perfect opportunity to pay special attention to lighting. If we are using a flash, we may need less light and if we are not using a flash we may need more light. That will partly depend on how much light is in the room where we will be taking the photo. Some rooms might have enough windows that we have enough natural light.

Other rooms might not have enough light unless we turn on some lights. When we take photos with lights on it sometimes causes us to get “light spots” that show up in the photo. Sometimes we can correct that by changing where we are standing.

Continue reading “Awesome Photos”

How would you like to earn 200 free bids?  I love the many opportunities DealDash.com offers us to earn free bids, and here’s one I did not yet know about until now.

First we must go to Official YouTube channel of DealDash

This is a really fun site. Each week DealDash customers can create a small video that meets the DealDash “Challenge of the Week.” The challenges run from Monday to Sunday and alternate on a weekly basis. Most weeks the video of the week is called the “unboxing.”

To get the 200 free bids on those weeks we simply send in a video of us opening one of the boxes of something we won on DealDash, but we must follow a few simple guidelines:

• A submission must not have been sent in already for that week. We have a limit of one submission per week
• The customer must have purchased any bid pack within the last 7 days

Other Challenges of the Week

This is where this “You Tube” weekly challenge gets really fun and interesting. In the past, Jessica of DealDash has given DealDash customers the following video challenges for the week:

Continue reading “Video Challenge of the Week”

After being an active shopper on DealDash.com since Feb. 8, 2012, I have seen a lot of changes and I have learned a lot of lessons – some from simply watching other shoppers and some from my own hands-on experiences.

Therefore, I decided to share some of my observations over the years.

Consistency Matters

If there is a particular auction that we really want to win, consistency matters. Regardless if the auction product has a high-dollar value or not, if we bid on the item each and every time it goes up for auction, eventually we will win. Some auctions are a lot more difficult to win than others and might take a lot longer, but the key is to never give up and to never stop trying.

I bid in one auction 44 different times before I finally won. One thing that helped is that the auction I won was limited to “only one per customer” so all previous winners were eliminated from competing. Another thing that helped me win is the special feature where all new bidders were eliminated after the auction reached only $3.00. Sometimes other shoppers are used to not seeing the “No New Bidders” banner go up until the auction reaches $5.00. Therefore, when all new bidders get locked out of the auction earlier than that it often means fewer shoppers get in on the auction in time, which is good. That usually results in less competition.

I learned a couple lessons from this experience. First, I might have won that auction sooner when it closed early, but I got distracted and failed to add more bids in time. Second, I might have won sooner if I placed 500 bids four times instead of 2,000 bids one time. But the bottom line is consistency matters.

Continue reading “Lessons Learned”