I Bid 2 Save

Yes, the number is actually in their name and URL.

Ibid2save (yes, it's all one word) is a penny auction site, an entity very different from, yet I feel related to, a PTC site.

So, what's a penny auction site? Simple. At its core, it's an online auction site, but all products are being sold by the site owner and are typically new-in-box merchandise. Participants can't enter the amount to bid; each new bid raises the auction price by one penny and only one penny. Bidding in the last few seconds of an auction adds a few seconds to the clock, so it's impossible to snipe. And while each bid raises the auction price by one penny, it costs between $0.60 and $1 to place each bid. Bids are typically bought in advance, in multi-packs, and must have already been purchased before they can be placed.

Fundamentally, penny auctions are a form of online gambling, though many of them have a "buy it now" option where non-winning bidders can buy the item at retail price minus the cost of all bids wasted; this is because many penny auction sites are based in the United States where online gambling is illegal, and coupled with an admonition to only bid on the items you're intending to buy anyway, giving losing bidders the right to apply their losses to the purchase price circumvents that prohibition.

Ibid2save is fundamentally different from many other penny auctions. On IB2S, there are two classes of bids; "cash bids" that are purchased as normal and count against "buy it now" prices, and "promo bids" which are handed out like candy and don't count towards "buy it now" prices.

Given the frequency with which they hand out promo bids (300 for joining, 10 for liking each individual Facebook post, 100-500 for entering near-weekly coupon codes, etc), it is highly unlikely that you will win any good auction without a substantial bid expenditure, making it a very bad idea to buy bids (though I've "won" auctions on promo bids alone). The vast glut of free promo bids is exacerbated by the fact that there are only 2-3 good auctions at a time at most; IB2S, unlike most penny auction sites, charges "auction fees" to the winner. The auction fee is supposed to be 10% of the auction item's retail value, but every single auction comes with an award of promo bids that are valued for auction fee purposes as if they were substantially more valuable cash bids. A careful perusal of the site (and some double-checking with Google) will reveal that for the vast majority of auctions, the promo bid award is calculated so that the auction fee will exactly equal the retail price of the item— and keep in mind that you will be expected to pay the closing auction price and an exorbitant shipping charge on top of this fee.

As such, the small handful of auctions that are potentially worthwhile given the value of the item relative to the auction fee will be so glutted with people expending cheap promo bids using the site-provided autobidder that the final closing price may well be higher than retail. (Autobidders don't stop until they run out of bids, so their owners may find they have won a $100 for $150 the next morning.)

I personally won a $200 Visa gift card for total price of $198.44 including final auction price, "auction fee" and shipping, offering me a net profit of $3.84 once credit card rewards are included. (Credit card rewards programs, however, are currently beyond the scope of this blog.)

Paying $198.44 to gain $200 in two weeks and $2.28 in a month is not something most people would consider worthwhile; I consider it a good deal since anything is better than nothing (and the $198.44 was charged to my credit card, which acts as an interest-free loan for the two-week shipping period).

And some lucky sod managed to reap a $65 profit on a similar auction; it's all based on luck of the bidders.

In any case, Ibid2save is unusual by penny auction standards but with a pile of free promo bids you might get lucky!