Deal Fun

Now for those of you who like both gambling and eBay, here’s a new pastime that I found via a press release on Reuters!

deal fun is an on-line auction centre for new electrical products that are available as a result of liquidation sales and warehouse clearances. Every product is brand new but has a starting value of $0.01 with the auction running for a period of time specified in advance by DealFun.

The idea is that you buy bid packs which work out to around $0.60 per bid. Each time you place a bid, the auction price will go up by 1 cent and one bid will be deducted from your remaining bids. In the spirit of traditional auctions where the auctioneer says ‘Going Once… Going Twice… SOLD!’, a maximum of 15 seconds is added to the timer every time someone bids, which gives enough time for someone else to make the decision to bid if they are interested.

If you are the top bidder when the timer reaches zero – you win! You will then pay the final auction price and shipping costs but your items still carry a warranty, which is not always the case with other on-line auction services.

Of course, the downside is that unsuccessful bidders have actually invested money each time they bid. However, the twist is that you don’t lose the bids that have been placed because you can use the “Buy Now” feature, where the cash value of the bids you have placed is subtracted from the ‘Buy It Now’ price of the item, and you only have to pay the difference. It’s just like buying the item at retail price, only many products are substantially cheaper than you would pay elsewhere.

It sounds like a fun way to get cut-price electrical goods but I do have one beef. Whilst they stock a wide variety of iPads, iPhones, Kindles, Laptops, LED TVs, PS3, Watches, Jewellery and Toys, they don’t currently have any of the ‘personal’ electrical items of which I am so fond, so I can’t stock up on cut-price ‘neck massagers’.

Having said that, their Customer Service was very prompt to reply to my query that new stock is coming in all the time so I live in hope and will be keeping my eyes open.