Sunday, February 20, 2011

BidRivals Review

This BidRivals review covers the good and bad aspects of BidRivals. For those who are wondering if BidRivals is scam, it is not. BidRivals is legit penny auction site which will ship your product if you win. However, this doesn't mean there are no negative aspects of the site: all it means is that it will not scam you by not shipping you items if you win them.

In my BidRivals review, I wish to cover both the positive and negative aspects. If you have something to add, please leave a comment and I'll try to include your thoughts (with proper citation of course!) So here we go:

BidRivals Review: The Positives
Here are some reasons in favor of investing your time and money in BidRivals:
  • BidRivals is Legitimate Penny Auction: This may sound trivial but you would be surprised to know the number of scams out there. This is why BidRivals is a great penny auction if you are looking for 100% legitimate sites i.e. penny auctions that will never withhold your product if you win. It takes a few days for the product to arrive, but it most certainly will. From the standpoint of the scams out there, BidRivals is certainly a great penny auction site to have fun and earn some great discounts in the process.
  • BidRivals is Global Penny Auction: If you are not from the US and UK, you really have very few legitimate penny auctions to bid on. Both US and UK are filled with a number of good penny auctions, most notably Quibids is US and Swoopoo in UK. However, if you are from Finland or Spain, I am not sure if you have many good options. BidRivals is a good penny auction in such cases.
  • BidRivals has Uniform Competition in a Day: This is actually a big deal and you will know if you are active in the penny auction scene. At BidRivals, there is approximately equal competition throughout the day. If you are at a site like Quibids, you will see that the nights are much more crowded than the days and early morning has almost no items to bid on. The reason BidRivals is much more uniform is because it is global and thus spanning many different time zones. The bidding is therefore much more uniform that you may expect at first.
  • BidRivals has Good Auto-Bidder: This is a two-edged sword so I must mention it in both positive BidRivals review and negative BidRivals review. BidRivals has BidAgent which is a really great auto-bidder. All you need to do is set the number of bids that you want to place and the maximum price up to which you are willing to bid. BidAgent will take care of the bidding for you. Therefore you can buy, say, 1000 bids and put them all in BidAgent for an iPad auction, go to sleep, and wake up the next day to be the winner. This is not possible in many other penny auction sites. For example, Quibids limits the number of bids in its auto-bidder to a maximum of 25. BidRivals has no such limits on BidAgent.
  • BidRivals has Good Customer Service: It is not the best, but it certainly is quite good. I would say a penny auction like Quibids is much more dedicated to customer service, but BidRivals is not far behind the industry leaders in this area. For any penny auction, it is very important to have good customer service as there can be any number of issues arising. I give a positive BidRivals review for customer service because they are better than the industry average. You would be surprised by how pathetic customer service can be at some of the other sites.
BidRivals Review: The Negatives
Here are things that you should know about BidRivals that are not so favorable. It is important to know all aspects of a site before investing your time and money.

  • BidRivals can be Competitive: BidRivals can get really competitive and you might have to spend a ton of bids to win a product. Worse, you might spend a ton of bids and end up not winning the auction. I have seen some of the highest competition for some products in the industry. However, I should mention that BidRivals is not competitive for all auctions - there are many times you will really get 90-95% off retail on this site. However, if bad luck stings you on an auction, it can be bitter. It is therefore important to read my BidRivals strategies to improve your winning chances significantly.
  • BidRivals Auto-Bidder can Suck: BidAgent, the auto-bidder can be a huge pain sometimes. This is especially so when there are two or more BidAgents competing against one another. In such a situation, single bidders seldom stand a chance. This is not good because it results in price escalation and everyone is almost forced to use BidAgent. Don't get me wrong - it can be a good tool but it can result in being very costly for the bidders too.
  • BidRivals can have Inadequate Auctions: There are times when I feel there are just too many bidders and too few items. I think BidRivals should work really hard on putting up more auctions. Otherwise it will lose bidders who will never bother to check back. It is important that people win regularly. Immediate profit cannot be the only driving force for a penny auction.
  • BidRivals has no Search: This is one of the worst features of BidRivals. Most penny auctions want to make it easy for the bidders to find previous winners and the prices of products that were previously sold. BidRivals wants to make this information as hard as possible to get. All auctions are listed in the chronological order, so if you want to know the historic price of say iPads, you have to browse through thousands of pages of crap before you can get what you are looking for. I find this highly annoying and it is high time they allow to search auctions by the name. Reputed sites like Quibids always have this feature, BidRivals doesn't.
  • BidRivals has no Exciting Features: Penny auctions try to attract bidders by offering them different types of auctions, but BidRivals can be dull and boring in that sense. If you look at sites like Beezid for example, you will find a lot of variety and thus more excitement. BidRivals can get incredibly boring at times especially when you have 5 BidAgents bidding against one another and there is nothing really happening for the next 10 hours. You will be surprised how bad it can get.
I hope this BidRivals review has helped you make a decision whether you want to join BidRivals or not. Drop a comment if you have anything to add or anything that I missed.

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