Consider the MacBook Pro that Swoopo sold on Sunday for […] $35.86. Swoopo lists its suggested retail price at $1,799; judging by the specs, you can actually get a similar one online from Apple for $1,349, but let’s not quibble. Either way, it’s a heck of a discount. But now look at what the bidding fee does. For each “bid” the price of the computer goes up by a penny and Swoopo collects 60 cents. To get up to $35.86, it takes, yes, an incredible 3,585 bids, for each of which Swoopo gets its fee. That means that before selling this computer, Swoopo took in $2,151 in bidding fees. Yikes.
The Crack Cocaine of Auction Sites | The Big Money - Mark Gimein does the math on Swoopo.com. It gets worse than that quote. It sounds like it gets worse than Vegas.
Source: thebigmoney.com
