Random Thoughts – Randocity!

I’ve always been fond of online auctions, until I found DealDash several years ago. I’ve also seen a number of people who have complained about DealDash and how it operates. Let’s explore if it’s a scam.

Auctions and Bidding

In a traditional auction, you’re actually buying from a seller who has put an item up for consignment to the auction house. This is how eBay works it. The seller uses the eBay platform to pay for their auction. If the item sells, eBay gets a cut of the profit. This is a typical auction from a typical auction house.

Bidders pay nothing to bid at eBay. You simply join the platform and off you go on your merry bidding way. You will pay for any auctions you win or any Buy-It-Nows you buy, but if you bid and don’t win, you pay nothing. This is important when understanding the difference between a site like eBay and DealDash.

At eBay, auctions have a finite end. If the auction closes at 6PM today, then it’s over at 6PM. Whomever was the highest bidder at 6PM is the winner of that auction.

DealDash Auctions

With DealDash, the auctions here work a bit differently. Instead of joining and bidding for free, you must pay for your bids. The bid cost can range between 12¢ and 60¢ per bid. In order to get started on DealDash, you’ll be required to pay for some initial bids. Sometimes DealDash offers bid sales for as low as 12¢ per bid.

As for the auctions themselves, they work quite a bit differently from eBay. Unlike eBay’s fixed close time, DealDash has no fixed auction close. Their auctions infinitely run and continue to extend until the 10 second countdown timer runs out without any further bids. As long as even one bid happens within that 10 second countdown, the auction extends with another 10 second countdown timer. Basically, an auction can run infinitely or until no one else places a bid. Bids also increment the item cost at 1¢ per bid. You spend 12-60 cents to raise the bid on an item by 1¢. Admittedly, that means the item cost goes up very slowly, but it also means that the bidding can go on for days with enough bidders.

Bid Extensions

You’re probably wondering about how people can manage to bid within 10 seconds. To answer your question, they don’t. Bidders use a feature that DealDash offers known as Bid Buddy. See below for more details. Suffice it to say that DealDash’s automated system continues punching in those bids in an automated way so users don’t have to. You’ll also notice that many of those bids are made right at the last moment of second 9. There’s no way a human could time a bid that precisely.

However, there has been some speculation that some of the bidding is rigged by DealDash. That speculation alleges that DealDash itself has its own set of automated bidders driving up auction prices and bringing attention to those auctions. I can’t tell one way or another if this is true. I’ll leave that speculation alone because of Bid Buddy and how it works.

Buy-It-Now

Both eBay and DealDash offer a Buy-It-Now option. However, these work entirely differently between DealDash and eBay. The eBay Buy-It-Now feature can be standalone or attached to an auction. If it’s standalone, you can only buy that product through Buy-It-Now. If it’s attached to an auction, you can only use Buy-It-Now before the auction begins. Once an auction has a first bid, the Buy-It-Now option disappears for that item.

With DealDash, if you bid on an auction, you are eligible to Buy-It-Now when the auction finally closes. You’ll buy the item at whatever price that DealDash offers, which they claim is usually at a substantial discount. In addition to buying the item, you’ll also get all of your bids back for free. This means you can reuse those bids again on future auctions. It’s not a bad deal if you really want that item. However, if you decline the Buy-It-Now purchase, you lose all of your bids. There’s a big incentive to bid on items where you are likely to buy it when the auction closes no matter the price.

Bid Buddy

DealDash offers an automated bidding service called Bid Buddy. It continues to bid on your behalf even when you’re not around to do so. eBay also has a similar feature, but it’s tied to the actual bidding process and doesn’t have a name. If you put in your maximum bid on an eBay auction, eBay will continue to bid on your behalf at the current bid increment until your maximum bid is reached. After that, you’d be responsible for upping your maximum bid or bidding manually.

Bid Buddy works in a similar way. It continues to bid on your behalf until you’ve run out of bids or reached the maximum number of bids set on that auction. The reason to use Bid Buddy is clear. Those who are using Bid Buddy get priority over those who are manually bidding. It is in your best interest to set up and use Bid Buddy rather than manually bidding. Otherwise, your manual bid will always be last in line.

So far, So good

So far, there’s nothing here extraordinarily bad about how DealDash works. Other than the infinitely open auction which I don’t personally like, it’s pretty straightforward in how it all works.

Products and Quality

Here’s where this site falls down hard. Do you go to DealDash to buy merchandise for a great deal or to spend time gambling to win? If it’s the former reason, then you might run into problems considering all of the below. If it’s for the latter reason, you might want to seek gambling help.

DealDash claims to offer overstocked products at “discount” prices. The difficulty with this business model is that DealDash is in this business to make money off of bidding with the side effect of an eventual sale of a product. They are not a retailer, not a discounter and definitely not in any way a reputable store. They are an auction house and that’s how they run it.

As a buyer, you’ll notice there’s nothing mentioned about a Return Policy or what to do if you receive damaged or unacceptable goods. Indeed, there’s nothing on any of DealDash’s auction listings that even mention the quality or authenticity of the merchandise that you will receive if you buy or win the bid.

The products purport to be genuine, but are they? Also, unlike eBay where there’s a seller behind each and every product, with DealDash, DealDash is the seller. This means that if you have a question about the sale of a product, you have to go to DealDash to get it answered. Worse, buyers have tried doing this with no response from DealDash.

If you’re actually wanting the product you’re bidding on, you might want to consider that what you’ll receive may entirely differ from the listing. In other words, the trust level with DealDash’s merchandise is very, very low. If you really want that merchandise, you can probably find it cheaper from a more reliable seller on eBay or Amazon without the bidding fees. On eBay, both the sellers and the products themselves have a reputation score. You can see what buyers are saying about both the product in the listing and of the seller’s reputation. You’ll notice that on DealDash, there is no reputation information about the seller nor reviews from buyers about the product or what they received. DealDash is a black box.

Being the black box that it is, unfortunately, DealDash is about as scammy as it can get from a site like this. If you can’t readily see what other buyers have received from a listing, then how do you know that you’ll receive anything of value? You don’t.

Additionally, because DealDash is not a traditional store, returning any merchandise may be next to impossible, particularly when you can’t get in touch with anyone at DealDash. If the item you receive is damaged, misrepresented or outright garbage, you’re stuck with it. Otherwise, you’ll have to dispute the credit card charge. The only other thing you can do is complain about DealDash… and many people have done exactly that on RipOff Report. However, other than venting your frustrations to the world or forcing a chargeback, you may not be able to get your money back.

Jumpers and No Jumper Auctions

Here’s where DealDash also gets just a little bit more scammy with their auction site piece. A jumper is a person who jumps in at the last minute and begins bidding on an auction when they think the auction time is about to run out. Unfortunately, jumpers on DealDash effectively mean nothing. A “No Jumper Auction” is simply a way to allow early bidders not to be outbid by someone who wants to jump in at the last minute. With DealDash, there is no such thing as a ‘last minute’. On eBay, there is a ‘last minute’ because auctions have a hard close time. On DealDash, the auction is infinitely extended so long as even one person continues bidding.

A “No Jumper Auction” sets a minimum bid point that after that no new bidders are allowed to enter the auction. If the no jumper point is set to $5, that means new bidders attempting to bid after $5 will be unable to do so. Only bidders who placed at least one bid below $5 will be able to continue bidding on that auction.

This then excludes users from auctions after the no jumper bid price has been met. On eBay, this is called ‘sniping’ or ‘snipers’. A sniper is a little different from a jumper in that because the auction close time is finite, snipers join in during the last 30 second countdown to try and outbid the current high bidder. With DealDash, a “No Jumper” feature is entirely pointless and just gives DealDash a way to manipulate auctions and who can bid. This feature only serves to force people into auctions early or wait for another one to start. This feature is simply a way to lower competition and allow early birds to win the auction more quickly without extra folks jumping in and keeping the auction open much longer. That seems to go against the idea of DealDash making more money. It’s kind of a weird feature for DealDash to add a limit auctions and prevent even more bidding, losing DealDash even more money in this process.

The scammy part of this is that apparently these “No Jumper” auctions don’t work properly, or DealDash is able to manipulate the “No Jumper” price randomly against would-be bidders. Some bidders have claimed to join in on standard “No Jumper” auctions with the default threshold set to $5. Yet, the auction price never reached $5 and they were unable to bid with DealDash claiming they were a jumper. Fishy. It seems this feature is being manipulated by DealDash in a way that prevents certain bidders (new or not) from bidding on that “No Jumper” auction.

Is DealDash worth it?

DealDash is ultimately an addictive form of legalized gambling, but it actually feels much like playing slot machines in Vegas. Mostly you lose, rarely you win and you spend a lot of money doing it…. which is how DealDash likes it. It’s what keeps them in business. If you’re willing to Buy-It-Now, you can buy back some of your bids at the cost of the product stated in the listing. But, don’t expect the price of the Buy-It-Now merchandise to be any less expensive than what you’ll find in a retail store, according to many who’d done this.

Some complainants who’ve used the Buy-It-Now option have been quite disappointed in the process. One user claimed that instead of getting their bids back as was promised, the “total value” of the bids was deducted from the price of the Buy-It-Now item. However, the “total value” of the bids applied to the reduction in the item’s cost were substantially lower than what the user paid for the actual bids. They might deduct at 12¢ per bid when the user paid 60¢ for the bids. Assuming you can actually get your bids back instead of this deduction thing, that’ll buy you a little more time to bid on new items and addict you further to this form of legalized gambling. This getting-bids-back idea is a little like losing $500 at BlackJack and then winning back $100. You’ve still lost $400. It’s simply a way to make you feel a little better about having lost $400.

If you get a high off of gambling, DealDash may be worth it… particularly if you don’t care about whatever it is you might win.

If you do happen to win the bid on item, then you’ll lose all of your bids plus whatever the winning cost of the item. If you happen to win a bundle of bids, then you’ll lose your bids only to gain some back. If you win the bid on a pair of earrings, you’ve lost however many bids it took to win that bid plus the cost of those earrings.

Consider if you don’t do Buy-It-Now often and you continually keep losing bids, you need to keep track of how much money you’ve spent there. You need to keep track because all of your lost bid money adds up when you finally do win a bid. For example, if you’ve spent $500 buying and losing bids for a while, then win a $50 coffeemaker, technically you’ve spent $550 for that coffeemaker. That’s not such a great deal. You could have bought 11 coffeemakers for the amount of money you spent to win that bid at DealDash. You simply can’t ignore all of the money you’ve spent on bids as non-existent. Those bid costs add into the cost of any items you bid and win. This means you can’t claim you got a toaster for $5. It was $5 plus the cost of however many bids it took you to get there.

Scam or Not?

The idea behind the site is fine, the execution of it is poor. If DealDash had partnered with legitimate sellers to back each of the auction products and if DealDash had allowed buyers to review the product listings for quality and authenticity and if DealDash offered a buyer’s protection plan and an actual Return Policy like a legitimate store, I might be more inclined to say it’s not a scam.

As it is, because DealDash doesn’t act like a legitimate store and also doesn’t offer feedback from buyers nor is there a buyer and seller relationship to ask questions, I cannot recommend the use of this site for any purpose… not for buying products and definitely not to get your gambling fix.

There’s too much of a chance to lose far too much bid money and very slim chances you’ll actually win a bid. Of course, you’ll be given the option to Buy-It-Now and get your bids back on auctions where you lost the bids, but that’s of little consolation if the merchandise you receive is trash, assuming you receive anything at all. Between the bids you pay for and the Buy-It-Now, this is how DealDash makes money. The rest is all an addictive game.

Testimonials

Don’t be fooled by people holding up a piece of merchandise that they claim to have received from winning an auction. There’s no guarantee those are legitimate photos. You have no idea if the merchandise you will receive is legitimate, counterfeit, refurbished, used, hot or in any other condition.

Even if the “winner” photos are legitimate, what you don’t know is how much those people have spent in bids to DealDash to “win” the privilege to buy the item at that price. They could have been bidding for years and have already spent a ton on bids before they finally won an iPad. In fact, they could very well have spent more than simply going to the Apple store and paying full price for one.

It’s just like being in a Casino. When you hear the bells ring and see the lights flash on a machine because someone has hit the jackpot, you really don’t know if that’s a win or if someone is simply making back a little money towards what they’ve already lost.

Recommendation

Site Recommendation: 👎 Avoid!
Reasons:

• Highly Addictive
• Form of gambling
• Not a store
• No Return Policy listed
• No Product Reviews
• No User Reviews
• No Seller Reviews
• Auction items don’t describe authenticity or condition
• Pay to bid
• Pay to win (separate from item cost)
• Costly
• Difficult to Communicate with DealDash
• Mostly a scam to separate you from your money
• Doesn’t operate like a legitimate store
• May be less costly to shop elsewhere
• Questionable business practices

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