When shopping on DealDash.com something that could help us save bids and win more auctions is learning how to consider the unknown factors.
The unknown factors are things we do not know about each of the auctions. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
Unknown Factor No. 1
Whenever an auction first opens for bidding, we do not yet know how many other shoppers will be competing with us. Of course, if we wait until all new bidders get locked out, we can then count the number of bidders who placed a minimum of one bid and, therefore, are qualified to go for the auction win. If we wait for other players to get locked out, we might also miss out if the auction happens to close early. I usually choose to only bid in auctions with 30 competitors or less. That seldom means, however, that all players who are qualified to bid in the auction will continue to play.
Many shoppers will place only one bid and leave and we might never see them again. Therefore, to get a more accurate count of how many true competitors we have, we need to check out the automated bidder, BidBuddy. If we look at BidBuddy, we can then see how many bidders have placed more than one bid. That will tell us how many serious (repeat) competitors we have.
Unknown Factor No. 2
We never know how many bids other players have or intend to invest in their effort to win the auction. Nonetheless, there are some things we can check to get an idea. First, we can check the list of winners and write down all the screen names of all of the shoppers who recently won a package of bids. If we see a competitor in the same auction who just won 500 bids and we only intend to invest up to 100 bids, it makes no sense to even try to compete with that player.
We can also look for screen names of shoppers who have a reputation of using an endless number of bids. If we see screen names of shoppers who usually have thousands of bids to burn, or screen names of shoppers who often over-bid the retail value of the product, we might not want to compete with those shoppers either.
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.