Topic: Idea, is it plausible? (Read 1457 times)

You can solve the not enough bids problem by involving your supplier or sockpuppet or helpful reliable bidding corp etc in the bidding.

Basically have a supply company that supplies the items and that also bids on them, basically buying back from the auction site anything that would otherwise be sold at a loss, and passing the savings back to the auction site company. (Having distinct companies to play the roles is mostly just a cosmetic thing to avoid the auction site itself directly messing with the auctions.)

For example if bids cost a dime each and you are auctioning something that cost a dollar you need ten bids just to break even from the bid tickets, leaving the actual amount bid as gravy. So just have helpful associates such as that supply company idea or whatever always make a bid in response to any third party bid until at least ten third party bids have been made.

Probably such approaches should be worked out carefully with legal counsel though as in some places auctioneers are not allowed to bid in their own auctions, and if that is the case the details of how long an arm you need for your reliable helpful bidder to be "at arms length" in your jurisdiction could vary from place to place and so on.

Certainly it is what I would expect any sleazy / unlicensed / scammy penny-auction place to do, the lower their traffic the more necessary it'd seem to do some such thing, and reading business/financial news does not lead me to expect businesses in general not to do such things if their lawyers let them.

-MarkM-

Penny auctions with a fixed ending time promote sniping bots (that bid at the last second) and if e.g. every bid extends the time by x minutes you promote the use of bots nevertheless who can bid 24/7 (to win when most people are sleeping) and you risk auctions going on forever.

Also penny auctions promote late bidding, so either you risk actually giving out items far below value if there are few bids and you start with a short time frame or you will have a LOT of "dead" auctions until the last minute(s).

Something that promotes earlier buying are raffles ("I sell 101 tickets for 0.01 BTC each and the 10 winners get 0.1 BTC"), but these are just like lotteries and selling goods might not work that well.

Maybe it's just my browser but that site seems a bit broken. I'm using chrome. Also I'm not sure where it said you can actually take money.. it said you sell an item to earn credits which you use to purchase another item. so it keeps whatever you earn from selling on the site. Is that how regular penny auctions work? Plus it accepts paypal. what if someone buys an auction but issues a reversal? Each time you bid I assume you are charged something so people could just start reversing those transactions.

I think a completely bitcoin oriented site would be better

I like the way you think good sir

Regardless of what people say on here, I will do this anyway. I think it's a unique concept, but the details are yet to be worked out. Do I post the items, or do I allow others to post items and share in the revenue of the items sold? In other words, allow the seller to grab a percentage or flat rate of the amount it cost to place a bid, as well as I take a cut for the price sold at? *rant/ramble*

Here it is:

http://www.mokimarket.com/

So I got an idea the other day which I'm not 100% sure on if it would work or not, so I thought I would pitch it here and see what people think.

You've heard of penny bid sites correct? Are they any bitcoin related sites that are similar? What I would like to create is a web site where you come to place bids of various products. Each bid will cost you a certain amount of BTC (the number can be changed, and isn't important). If you bid on, and win the product/service then you need to pony up the amount of BTC that you agreed to as well.

So that is it in a nut shell. Just wanted to toss the idea out there and see what you guys think.