I wasn’t going to do any shopping on DealDash.com today, but the daily challenge was to get three extra hours on the clock for placing 500 bids. Today’s Father’s Day feature also offered us 3X time on the clock for each bid. That was too good to turn down so I decided to go for it and I’m sure glad I did.
I just won a 691 bid pack using only 38 bids. Do you want to know how I did it?
Looking for trends
I usually place bids on smaller bid packs because they are often easier to win using a fewer bids. While I was checking out the Winners’ List, however, I noticed one larger bid pack of 691 bids sold early a couple times and the winners only used a small number of bids. It looked like a trend, so I decided to place some bids on the 691 bid pack, too, and it worked!
Sometimes other shoppers might be thinking alike. In this case it appeared shoppers were fiercely competing to win the smaller bid packs while the larger 691 bid pack was somewhat being ignored. Why? Many shoppers assume the larger bid packs that are more difficult to win. However, that’s not always true. In this case, it was easier to win the larger bid pack.
Below are more lessons I learned on how to win auctions using fewer bids.
The early bird catches the worm
When I was a child, my mother often told me, “The early bird catches the worm,” and I had no idea what she was talking about. Later in life I learned. That advice can work really well when shopping on DealDash, too.
Most shoppers place only one bid at the beginning of an auction so they will not get locked out from competing later on. Many of those shoppers get focused on other auctions and never return. Therefore, it’s a good idea to place more than one bid in the early part of an auction. Sometimes auctions suddenly sell and close earlier than shoppers anticipate. If we happened to be one of the few “early birds” that placed more than one bid during the early part of an auction, we can sometimes slip through the cracks and win early, too.
Know when to hold some bids for later
When six to eight shoppers are seriously competing for the win, it might not make sense to compete with that many. Instead, we can save a lot of bids by waiting until the auction looks like it will soon close because it’s down to only two or three other shoppers. If we look at the selling price for previous winners, we can often get a good idea when the time is right to jump in with a bunch of bids.
At that point, one of the following three things will likely happen:
- If our competitors joined the auction early and we joined the auction late, we might outbid our shopping opponents and win;
- If our final shopping opponents are “never quitters” who frequently overbid, we might have a better opportunity to win if we cancel our bids and place them in another duplicate auction instead;
- If we are one of the three final shoppers we might see one of our competitors drop out but as soon as one drops out, another one jumps in. That could happen several times and we never know how many “hold-out” shoppers planning to do the same thing. We can do a “test” to find out, but it’s a little risky when we’re one of only three shoppers. We could drop out temporarily to see if another shopper will jump in, but the auction could suddenly close if we do that. However, if someone else does jump in, we can save our bids until one drops out again. If not, we can quickly put our bids back in.
Many DealDash shoppers are pretty smart and have developed some excellent winning strategies. Regardless, that’s all part of the challenge that makes this kind of shopping so much fun, right?
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.