Yesterday afternoon, we had the honor of meeting with the PenniesTrifecta Team. We began talking with Jim McNeill at the beginning of December 2011, and were immediately impressed by his unique contributions to the penny auction industry. So, after a couple months of exchanging emails and phone calls, we drove about 2 hours north, to Lufkin, Texas to meet at an Applebee's for lunch. When we arrived, we were introduced to the four wonderful people that make up the PenniesTrifecta Team:

Wayne & Allison Roberson - Jim & Barbara McNeill

PenniesTrifecta.com was born, not just out of a desire to start a business, but also as a way to keep Jim McNeill busy. See, last July, Jim was given only 6 months to live. He developed Base of Tongue Cancer, which was quickly spreading across his entire jaw and face. With heavy hearts, Jim's family prepared for a series of "lasts" (his Last Birthday, his Last Christmas). But then, Jim's doctors asked him if he would try an experimental hemoglobin treatment. Jim consented to the treatment, and just three months ago, he was pronounced cancer-free! Today, he still struggles with the after-affects of radiation treatment, but he and his family are more than thankful for this reprieve.

While Jim was receiving radiation treatment, his wife, Barbara, daughter, Allison and her husband, Wayne were thinking of ways to keep him busy and occupied. See, Jim is an Engineer and a Math Whiz, and he never really was built for a sedentary lifestyle. Knowing that he would heal faster and easier if his mind was kept stimulated and entertained, Wayne introduced Jim to the idea of operating a penny auction site. They met, crunched numbers, discussed the industry at length, laid out a solid plan for a unique site - and PenniesTrifecta was born.

Jim and Allison, who are the most involved in day-to-day operations, explained to us that they really wanted to take the negatives of the penny auction industry and replace them with positives. One of the biggest negatives they observed is that, in most auctions on most sites, there is only one winner. All other customers who spend time and money bidding are out both their time and their money. Jim just knew there had to be a way to fix this problem and to give back to his customers.

PenniesTrifecta has taken the traditional penny auction format and made it better.

How does PenniesTrifecta do this?

1. Three Winners Per Auction.
When you bid on a gift card auction on PenniesTrifecta, you have three chances to win, either as First, Second, or Third Place. For example, if there are multiple bidders on a $100 gift card auction, the last person to bid when the clock hits "00:00" is the winner. They will receive the $100 gift card. However, both the second and third place bidders will also receive something! The second runner-up will receive a $50 gift card, and the third runner-up will receive a $25 gift card. So, you have a chance to win in 100%, 50% and 25% increments on each auction!

2. Monthly Bid Rebates.
Every customer (bidder) will receive a 5% rebate based on the bids he or she spends at PenniesTrifecta. The rebate will be credited to the customers account on the tenth of the month following the month the bids are spent. For example if a customer spent 160 bids on auctions in June, he or she would receive a credit to their account of 8 bids on July 10th. (Can you see where Jim's math savvy comes into play?)

3. "Turf Club".
As their way of thanking you for registering and buying a minimum bid pack, PenniesTrifecta is currently offering each new customer a free 90-day membership in the Turf Club. The "Turf Club" is a vehicle used to provide additional incentives and financial support to PenniesTrifecta customers. Any customer that spends more than 20 bids per month will profit by joining the “Turf Club”. Membership in the “Turf Club” also increases your monthly rebate from 5% to 20%.

If you are a regular member at Pennies Trifecta LLC, and you spend 80 bids during one month you will receive 4 (80 x 5% = 4) free bids on the tenth of the following month.  That is a $3.08 (4 x $0.77 = $3.08) value.  If you are a member of the “Turf Club” and you spent the same 80 bids, you would receive 16 (80 x 20% = 16) free bids on the tenth of the following month. That is a $12.32 (16 x $0.77 = $12.32) value.

“Turf Club” members also receive advance notice of promotions and new services if they wish to sign up for such information.

4. Cold Hard Cash Derby.
PenniesTrifecta has brought the excitement of a derby right to your office/living room via their "Cold Hard Cash Derby". In a nutshell, the CHCD allows bidders to form teams of up to 5 people, bid on the live auctions, and win cash! How, you ask? The team that wins the most auctions, wins the money!  PenniesTrifecta will award 15 prizes totaling 7% of the net sales for the calendar year 2012. Four (4) quarterly awards will be issued to 3 teams as follows:

More information can be found by following the link above or by contacting PenniesTrifecta directly at [email protected]

Aside from ensuring that there are more winners per auction, PenniesTrifecta also ensures that their customers are safe and secure in every aspect. Not only do they provide the actual cost and savings of an auction on each auction description, but they also provide several safe methods of payment (including MasterCard Secure Code, NOCA, and Verified by Visa), Beginner Auctions, a Bid Jockey and a fair Bid Refund Policy. Some of these features are relatively unheard-of amongst most penny auction sites, and are features we believe to be important and note-worthy.

PenniesTrifecta does utilize a Reserve System, but this should not deter potential customers. Each auction has a Reserve of 0.98% based on the retail price of each card. This insures that part of the cost PenniesTrifecta will incur for “Three Winners” and their Monthly Rebate program will be covered. It is important to note that some penny auction sites don’t charge a visible reserve and often advertise sales that were obviously below cost, as if that was an example of a typical auction. In fact, the average sales price of an item on a penny auction is around 6% of the retail price - six times the reserve on PenniesTrifecta.

Jim, being the Math Whiz he is, lives by the old axiom, "Figures don’t lie, but liars figure". If you would like to challenge any of these figures, Jim welcomes emails from customers ([email protected])!

In closing, we were incredibly impressed with the honesty, transparency, and genuine warmth we received from Jim and the PenniesTrifecta Team. We believe they have implemented a unique concept that has the potential to overshadow and outshine the traditional penny auction format.

PennyBurners supports PenniesTrifecta 100% and we recommend them to our members without hesitation.

We hope you will give PenniesTrifecta a try and that you have a fun, pleasant experience getting more for your money. If you would like to read or leave reviews and feedback for Jim and his team, please join the PennyBurners Penny Auction Forum. Have questions about their auctions, Win Limits, or special features? They'd be happy to answer them via phone, email, or the PenniesTrifecta Forum!

Late yesterday morning, the PennyBurners Penny Auction Forum was rocked with some startling news. A new member by the name "ArrowOutletInfo" posted the following message:

"Mathematicians at the University of California, San Diego discovered that ArrowOutlet.com uses robots and wins 70% of their own auctions. Collected data shows that each month, ArrowOutlet fools 1,000 real users and takes $130,000.00 from them."

Nick, the Administrator of PennyBurners.com, immediately dove into action and emailed the member behind "ArrowOutletInfo", who called him on the phone just as quickly. After discussing the detailed data and statistics that can be found at www.ArrowOutletInfo.com, it became pretty apparent that this outrageous claim against ArrowOutlet was not so outrageous after all.

Without going into a long, drawn-out explanation here of what you can already find at the site, these UCSD students, this is the pertinent information:

The key to distinguishing robots from humans at ArrowOutlet.com, is looking at each user's Bid Histogram. A Bid Histogram is like a person's fingerprint. Each Histogram should be unique. At ArrowOutlet.com, 3,000 users have the same Histogram. And, this common Histogram is actually impossible for a human to achieve using the webpage's Bid Now button or Bid-O-Matic. If you want to jump to the punch-line and view every user's Histogram, click here. If you want to learn more about Histograms, click here.

The PennyBurners Team was very concerned with this news, and so we called ArrowOutlet after some "creative" investigative work to get their number and it went like this: