A dollar per bid is really expensive. The most popular Penny Auction site seems to be Happy Bid Day and they charge 35 cents per bid. Quibids is 60 cents per bid. Most Googling for Penny Auctions results in scam warnings because of shill bidders and bots.
Unless nobody is actually going to end up paying a dollar a bid because of "packages". Even then, the low package has you paying out, what? 85 cents a bid? I'm just throwing out random numbers here, but I think bidding will be more lucrative if people aren't spending a dollar a bid. I mean, who wants to be the first bidder in that situation? You're almost certainly throwing a dollar away if you're any of the first 10 - 20 bidders for most items, if not all.
That being said, usually you have to pay the final cost of the item too. Is that the plan for pennyauctions.click?
Good point.
I will lower bid to 50 cents.
Our penny auction will be different than the others. (I´m aiming more to provide service than sell stuff.)
Anybody can run his own penny auction on our site. (no place for bots + shill bidders....(it would not be profitable))
And off course, final cost will have to be payed too.
50 cents per bid is much more competitive, good change. Will there be packages where a person can buy a large amount of bids at a discount? Sales? I find that people pretty much don't buy on my website unless there is a "double donations" deal. Basically, buy one get one free. I personally prefer to wait for the deals at places I shop and sites I use as well.
What will be the policy if the winning bidder decides they don't want the item after they've won the bid already? I see that the person who places the auction will have to put their funds in escrow, but I'm curious about the winner. Could it just default to the 2nd place winner after X time?
Will there be a promotion that gives free bids to verified new users? I think that at .50 a bid a fair introductory offer is probably 10 - 20 bids. I think the average site does a $5.00 sign up bonus. I don't know how others feel, but I feel that this is a valuable and even necessary marketing tool. It would also probably be good to offer something like 1 free bid for following on Twitter, and 1 free bid for liking on Facebook. Maybe there could be some kind of referral program where a person would earn a % of the amount of bids a referred user purchased. Example, if I referred my friend Steve and Steve bought 100 dollars worth of bids at .50 a bid then I would receive 20 free bids. Doesn't have to be 10%, of course, but that's just an example.
I noticed on other sites they sell some huge bid packs at a discount. So it might be worth considering adding something like a 1k bid pack. 1k bids at 50 cents is $500, so could drop that down to like $450, which is 45 cents a bid. A 2500 bid pack could be like $1050. At that point they're practically getting 500 bids for free though so these numbers might be too generous. That is still 42 cents a bid, though. Then you could do a real big one, 5k bids for $2000. That's still 40 cents a bid.
Another thing I noticed on some other sites is that they offer free to play auctions. They don't require any "bids" but they really drive up traffic, good for adsense or coinad and just for marketing in general. They still have to pay the final value, though, and most of the time the prizes are bid packs. So you could have a free-to-play bid for say a 20 bid bid-pack. That's a $10 value. Everyone will want that "free" bid pack so they'll be fighting over it to the point that they end up paying close to $10 for the bid pack. Good and fun way to promote the site.
