| Tagalog Translation: Click here |
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| What's the Big Idea here? |
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| You might be asking yourself why you should bid on Bidgatin when we obviously have reserves. What's the fun in that? |
| Here's our vision for our customers: Shop for something you want to buy and aim to get 30, 40, 50 or up to 99% off of the product price. If you don't win, we have a number of ways to still give you good value for your money! |
| Scope out (nominate) something you want to buy. It could be an LCD tv,an iPad, a shopping spree at Nieman Marcus, a luxury watch, etc. When an item you're interested in goes online, we will notify you by email and/or sms message.
Plan your strategy for using your bids so that you spend as little as possible in bids to win the item. If you hit the reserve price in our non-timed auctions or are the last bidder when the clock hits 0:00 in our timed auctions, you win the item for the auction price and hopefully a bigger discount than most stores could dream of giving you!
If you place enough bids to equal the retail price of the item, we will notify you and you can just pay the shipping and handling to get it. If you lose the auction and still want to get the product you have 2 hours after the auction ends to pay the difference in price between the value of your bids placed (P10/bid) and the retail price + shipping and it's yours. If you don't want to use the Buy-It-Now option, it's ok: every 100 bids you place without using the BIN option entitle you to P100 in your cash bank. Over time, your cash bank balance will grow and you can just buy whatever you want from our site. How can you really lose? |
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You can be confident we will ship your product: Let's face it: some of the incredible deals you will see on other sites are incredible because they'll never happen. Either those sites were outright scams or the site owners did not think through their math and are robbing Peter to pay Paul. On Bidgatin, however, we will take a modest profit on our non-timed auctions (including giving bonuses to other bidders) and ship immediately after confirming the winning bidder. All the bids in the auction paid for the product so there is no need to run a ponzi scheme as some sites are effectively running This also means we will be around for a long time so your time and money invested will not go to waste.
You know the highest prices our auctions will run to. At some timed auctions, people just keep extending some auctions for all sorts of reasons, and end up frustrating a lot of people in the process. In our non-timed auctions, your investment has a much higher chance of winning an auction because we tell you the range in which the auction will end.
You get bonuses even if you lose! In all our non-timed auctions, we give bonuses just for participating. In regular No-Timer Auctions, if you hit lucky price points you win cash bonuses applicable to buy products at retail price on this site. In our Firework Auctions we give you even greater chances to win cash bonuses! In our Pyramid auctions, the bidders with the most bids win cash bonuses also, so there is no chance involved,, just keep clicking your mouse!
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| Q. Is this gambling? Don't you need to be lucky to win? |
| A. We are not lawyers but have kept an eye on nationwide trends and the vast majority of legal decisions say penny auctions are legitimate auctions. Think about it: is bidding on eBay gambling? No, but the argument goes, in penny auctions you pay for bids, like in slot machines. So what? Many high class auctions have pay-to-attend auctions (Sotheby's, Christies, Barrett-Jackson, etc) What's the difference between pay-to-register and pay-to-bid? You might end up saving a lot more on pay-to-bid auctions. eBay has had reserve auctions for a long time also so we see no reason to call penny auctions gambling. In honest sites, you bid against other humans, not computers so it is interaction just like on eBay. Some folks call it entertainment shopping or competitive shopping. Call it what you want, we just want to give you a good deal and make a reasonable profit at the same time! |
| Account |
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| Q. I lost my password/ I cannot get into my account. |
| A. Please click Lost Password and have a new temporary password sent to your email address or mobile phone. |
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| Traversing Site |
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| Q. I am not getting text messages. Why not? |
| A. Please check that your mobile number has only numeric characters: ie 0 through 9, no spaces. If editing your number does not deliver sms messages to your phone, please contact us when we are online on Live Help, Yahoo Messenger or Skype so we can check the problem in real time. |
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| Bidding |
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| Q. How do I change my bidding icon? How do I change my avatar? |
| A. Click Change Bidding Icon or Change Account Picture in your account. |
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| Q. When does an auction end? |
| A. A normal timed auction auction ends when the timer hits zero. If for some reason it seems the timer has hit zero but the auction continues, it may be because the time your PC got was rounded down to zero for you but another bid microseconds after your computer's request kept the auction going. You can check the bid time in the last 10 bidders list and everything should make sense. |
| In non-timed auctions (No-Timer, Pyramid, Firework, etc) the auction ends when a bidder clicks onto a random, pre-determined price. |
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| Q. What is the best way to bid? |
| A. There are a few styles of bidding and you should develop your own strategy. Some people want to start early in an auction and outlast other bidders. Other bidders want to jump in at the optimal point. |
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| In non-timed auctions (No-Timer, Pyramid, Firework, etc) one strategy would be to bid as often as possible so that you can gain the prizes won in the course of bidding. In No-Timer Auctions, cash balance prizes are given at random, pre-determined price points in the auction. In Pyramid auctions, the people with the most bids get the cash balance prizes. In Firework auctions the number of cash balance prizes available is much greater than in No-Timer auctions so more chances are available for winning on the way to the auction end. |
| Q. Is there a max # of bids I can place? |
| A. Yes. Penny Auctions can give great deals and we don't want overbidding, on your part or your competitors' part to leave a bad taste in your mouth. We don't let you bid more in paid bids than the item is worth. If you place P300 of bids into a P300 call card, we stop you from bidding further and just ask you to pay the shipping fee if you want to claim it. We understand you may lose the auction and lose some face or reputation, but we want as few people as possible to feel they overspent on our site. |
| We have a few different types of auction formats that limit bidding but we think give more people greater chances of winning auctions with fewer bids because our auction formats give bidding wars fewer chances to start. |
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| Q. Why don't you auction off bid packs? |
| A. After thinking long and hard about this, we have decided the Buy It Now option and cash balance are as good hedges on your hard-earned money as bid pack auctions are. We advise you only bid on items that you want to buy anyway and if you don't get a great bargain, just buy it now at reasonable market rates, or use your cash balance to purchase it. If people stock up on cheap bid packs, they can actually cost you more money and time bidding. |
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| Selling Bid Packs seems to be currency devaluation and in our opinion the main cause of why some penny auctions go out of business: too many bidders build up banks of thousands of cheaply won bids and can easily outlast novices. Novices look elsewhere and a PA site is left with many bidders redeeming bids that really have no financial punch to them then the evil cycle of not having enough money to cover products and selling bid packs cheap starts and a PA site is looking at trouble. |
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| Our site is a business and for us to be able to list attractive products and strive to ship them quickly, we need a reliable revenue stream. There are PLENTY of penny auction sites that put up iPads and LCD Tvs and sell bid packs like crazy but bidders with some experience know some of those sites are well in the red. Many sites are 3-12 months behind in shipping and we think bid packs won in auctions are partly to blame. That's right. Some bidders have been waiting a year for their wins while the company stays in business. How would you like that? We didn't think so either. We want to stay in the black and feel as long as we have reasonable competition in auctions, we can ship won products the next business day. |
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| Q. What is the cash balance for? |
| A. At Bidgatin, we want everyone to get a sense of value for their hard earned money.Some people may not win auctions in their first few attempts so we say that for every 100 bids that you place and don't use as credit toward purchasing a product, we will credit you P100. You can then use your cash balance to purchase what you like. If you place a few bids (say 20 total) in a few auctions daily, your cash balance will grow quickly! In 5 days you can get P100 credited to your cash balance. |
| Q. How does your auto-bidder work? |
| A. First select the number of bids you want to use. Second select the time intervals between which you want the bid place. VERY IMPORTANT: The auto-bidder is based on your web page, not our server so we recommend at least a 3 second interval (eg. Input 3 to 6) to account for network delays. If you input 3 to 6, the auto-bidder will probably bid at 6 seconds but may bid at 5, 4 or 3 seconds depending on your CPU/network load. It will not bid at 2 nor 1 seconds. Then indicate at what price your auto-bidder should start bidding. If you feel the auction will end at P1.00, you may want to start bidding at P0.90 or P0.95 and not bother auto-bidding earlier. |
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| Q. How much do bids cost? |
| A. Bids cost P10 each, available in the following packages:
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| Look-See Pack: 10 bids - P100 |
| Basic Pack: 25 bids - P250 |
| Medium Pack: 50 bids - P500 |
| Large Pack: 100 bids - P1000 |
| Jumbo Pack: 250 bids - P2500 |
| Mega Pack: 500 bids - P5000 |
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| Payment/Shipping |
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| Q. I have won an auction. How long do I have to pay? |
| A. You have one week to pay. If you have an issue please contact us. |
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| Q. I lost the auction, how long do I have to use the Buy it Now option? |
| A. You have two-hours from the end of the auction to use the Buy It Now option. |
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| Q. Can you combine shipping for multiple items won? |
| A. Sure, at our discretion, we will either give you cash or bid credits on the site if the shipping cost of combined wins is much less than what we charged you. Please keep in mind that our shipping charges also include handling which includes us picking up and/or stocking the items so we have to figure in gas and time. |
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| Q. Can I trade my wins for gift cards or bid credits? |
| A. At this time, no. We have a Wish-List feature that allows you to nominate and vote for whatever product you want, so at this time, we don't see a need to run an exchange program. | |
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| Q. The timer skipped/froze and I did not bid and lost the auction. |
| A. Penny Auctions require a lot of bandwidth and also increased computing power on your own computer. Our bids are received in Unix time and translated into human readable time after the bid is received. |
| At this time, we are using a first generation method of relaying javascript requests, which most other PA sites seem to be using also. Within the next three months we are confident we will have a second generation method running. This method is much less resource hungry and should provide a much smoother auction experience. |
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| Q. Do you use bots or automated bidding? |
| A. Not for live auctions. We don't want to commit business suicide and frankly we don't see any reason for shill bids in reserve auctions. |
| We have a few names that we use for demonstration and testing: Anthony, Brenda, Charles, Denise, Elbert, Frieda and Gopal. Also if we use any of these test accounts, the type of bid will appear as bidrunner, not manual or autobid. |
| *Important: We do allow 3rd party statistical and bidding software, unlike most other penny auction sites. We want our bidders to act intelligently and intelligence is comprised of information and using the information wisely. We see penny auctions more like stock or currency trading rather than gambling. |
