Ebay is to easy for you? It does not give you enough thrill?
You should probably try a penny auction.
Maybe you have seen an appealing banner on facebook: "Mr X just bought a LCD television for 3 dollars. Visit our site".
Is it true or is it a scam? how does it work?
It is not a scam (at least if we don't consider lotto, roulette and the fortune wheel scams). Penny auctions websites introduced a very interesting mechanism: you pay to bid, so the real earning for the website is not the price you pay for the good you are bidding on, but the prices that all the bidders paid to bid.
Let's make an example: in this moment I am visiting www.beezid.com: one of the current auctions is for a LG 37'' HDTV that retails for about 700 dollars. The auction starts from a price of 0 dollars: people start bidding and each bid increases the price of only 1 cent but costs to the bidder 1 dollar and increases the time before the end of the auction of 20 seconds...so there is always time for another bidder to outbid you!!! At this moment the price of the HDTV is 8 dollars (i.e.: 800 dollars of revenues for the website), but it recently sold for 15.60 $ (1560 Dollars of revenue).
Why is this similar to gambling? On Ebay you set your price equal to your willingness to pay, on a penny auction your willingness to pay is equivalent to the number of bids you are going to make. The problem is that a new bidder can join in any moment of time, so you don't have any kind of control on the return on your investment.
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