A few years ago, I learned about Swoopo, an interesting type of online auction website that had bidders pay for bids. As I recall, there was some controversy surrounding the type of auctions on the site, because a $100 item that sells for $10 could conceivably have hundreds of dollars worth of bids to get to the final sales price.
You can read a couple or articles about the controversy surrounding Swoopo here and here. There are plenty of others that I could find, but I think those two articles summarize the issue pretty well.
According to an entry on Wikipedia, “in March 2011, Swoopo’s website became inaccessible, and a notice page claimed that Swoopo was experiencing “technical issues.” On March 26, 2011, Swoopo’s parent company filed for bankruptcy. There is no information regarding whether the site will reopen or permanently close.”
It looks like the later part of that excerpt has been answered when you have a look at Sedo’s weekly sales report (via TheDomains.com). Last week, Swoopo.com sold for 10,000 EUR (roughly $13,000 USD). When you visit Swoopo.com, the domain name forwards to DealDash.com, which appears to be a penny bid auction website.
According to the DealDash website, “DealDash is the longest running penny auction site in America. DealDash ´s Buy it Now option removes the risk of losing from penny auctions by allowing losing bidders to purchase the product at a fixed retail price and get a full refund of all the bids lost in the auction.”
This seems to be a wise (and cost effective) acquisition for Deal Dash, since there seem to be a significant number of references to Swoopo and quite a few inbound links. I don’t know if the company purchased any other intellectual property, but the domain name was a smart purchase.
Swoopo had very unsteady legs to stand on. The concept was so deceiving to consumers. Advertising as a “cheap” way to get electronics and such while having people pay for bid credits in order to “bid up” for profits just doesn’t work. There was something inherently dishonest about the platform. It came across more like a gambling site than anything else.
Hopefully new owners can put it to good use.
Thanks for reporting on this. Very interesting!