25Satang.com – Pay to bid auctions


This is a new one.  The Thai auction site 25Satang.com launched earlier this year, lets you buy bids by the pack, like 10 bids for 90 Baht or 700 Bids for 4,800 Baht.  The average price per bid comes out to 7 baht.  The bid increment? You guessed it, 25 satang.  This means to get to the bid price of 10 baht, there are 40 bids or 280 Baht worth of bids.  If an item sells for a winning bid of 10 baht, and you are lucky enough to come in at the last minute with the winning bid, you pay for you bid (7 baht) and the price of the item i.e. 17 Baht.  If you lost the auction, but bid 20 times, you paid 140 Baht.

Two actual examples from the company site:

Auction: Samsung 32″ LCD TV. Retail price: 13,990.  chai1974 was the winner with 202 bids, and a final auction price of 214.75.  chai1974 paid a total of 1,679 Baht to for this brand new TV.  Not bad.  The company pulled in about 6,000 baht worth of bids.  Likely a bit of a loss for them.

Auction: Iphone 3GS  Retail price: 27,948 baht.  chai1974 was the winner (again) with 3,855 bids, and final auction price of 5395.25 baht.  chai1974 paid a total of about 33,344 baht for this brand new iPhone. Whoa. And how did the company do? They pocketed around 151,000 baht!

It’s and interesting concept, but lets see how long it flys.  With every bidder but the winner losing money on each auction, not sure how long it will be till people get the hang of it.  It’s got a great hook though, once you’ve blown 100 Baht in bids, you can hardly stop.


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