Beezid Scam
Wow, these things seem to be popping up at a dime a dozen. I don't know how many of ya are familiar with Penny auctions, but a penny auction is a place where theoretically, you can get very expensive items for a fraction of the retail price, although it is seldom as simple or as penny-ish as commonly believed. I read Wallace's post on Quidbids and started doing a little investigating of my own on penny auctions, and at first, I wasn't sure I understood them, but then I began to realize how they operate, which is more or less all the same, with subtle differences based on the company. The one I'm focusing on today is called Beezid.com. The first thing I noticed about all the reviews I could find, was that they were all negative. Now being that I have been trying really hard to be more neutral and fair when it comes to these things, I wanted to be much more open-minded and dismiss the complaints as the usual negative percentage. This was hard however, because the complaints I have found seem really legit, so much so that I am a bit leery of penny auctions in general, but lets get into some details.
Beezid has a doom prophet that seems to follow its Internet chatter. By that I mean a reoccurring complaint from various people that they feel as though they are bidding against bots. See with a penny auction, you are hoping to land that fancy item you want for pennies, the problem is that it will cost you a dollar every time you bid, so if you try really hard to get that old copy of Cowboy Beebop on VHS for 99 cents, you have to pay a dollar to outbid the next guy every time he bids a cent over yours. You can imagine the costly struggles that soon ensue. Another popular complaint is that people visibly won the auction, but no product is ever actually received.
Put simply, Beezid works by selling the actual bids, unlike EBAY, where the bidding is basically free while EBAY gets a cut of the transaction. They even sell bids in packages, so you can buy a pack of say 20 bids at a set price....sort of takes the "penny" out of the auction don't ya think? I actually read a blog about a woman who's husband is so addicted to Beezid that they actually place little wagers on chores as to what username will win the auction. The toughest challenge I see when it comes to this kind of thing is that its hard to find someone that you're certain isn't a bot, or a Beezid representative. That makes it hard to find anyone who has actually received their winning bid product and get an honest opinion. I did find a letter on the Internet that a woman wrote expressing her intense frustration with Beezid in regard to being sent countless automated Responses to her issue. In her letter, she described how she had officially won a bid on two items, with the confirmation telling her "ENDED" in addition to giving her item confirmation numbers. Moments later, the bid counter restarted, essentially restarting the bidding. Obviously, this is a problem. What it amounts to is that she was now charged on all of those bids she placed, and never won the items, even though technically she did. In an environment like that, who can police and prevent a company from simply having bots outbid the customers until they have extracted enough....pennies...
Beezid as it is now doesn't seem like a viable company to get involved with, and due to a major shortage of positive feedback, I have no choice but to place this in the scam section. The golden lesson here is that it is a rare occurrence to truly receive something awesome for free or close to it, and the old saying, you don't get something for nothing really does ring true. We are often promised that we may receive "deals" etc, but generally, there is always a string attached, and you are better off knowing what the string is, like on Ebay. You may not get the super discount you were looking for, but you can at least trust in the system to do what it says it will do.
