Beezid Auction Loss = Win?

PennyBurners member and Beezid bidder, Muchomaas, recalls his best auction

– a spectacular loss –

in anticipation of Beezid’s Memorial Day Promotions.

I am fairly new to penny auctions. I started last December after seeing a Beezid commercial on television. But I have done fairly well, and I talk about my experience at http://www.pennyburners.com/beezid/beezid-testimonial. This article is about the most important auction experience I have had. No, it is not about an HDTV win in a regular auction, or a blitz auction win (another television) against an opponent who had an overwhelming bid advantage over me. This is about an auction loss. And not just any loss. But a spectacular, jaw dropping, awesome car crash of a loss. A loss that in the immediate aftermath I thought effectively finished me, but, as it would turn out, did the exact opposite.

Beezid is doing another promotion this Memorial Day weekend, this one combining their bid for free blitz starting Sunday evening and running for 24 hours straight, followed by an extended "early bird" auction special in which the winners get their bids returned. Readers on this forum know that the bid for free blitzes are my favorite event on Beezid. Not only are they good opportunities to learn how to use Beezid’s bidding tools, which are different (and in my opinion vastly superior), but they are immensely fun and risk free. The auction prices are capped at 25% of retail. In addition, today (Saturday) Beezid has a special promotion code available, “Heroes”, where you get 100% extra promotional bids (which expire on June 1) to match your bid purchase.

Following the bid-for-free blitz, and a three-hour break, Beezid is running an eight-hour “Early Bird” auction special. Beezid “early bird” auctions usually run from 5 to 8 a.m., Monday through Friday. They are like regular auctions, except the winner (and only the winner) gets their bids back.

There are a lot of strategies and approaches to regular Beezid auctions. “Early Bird” auctions are different. There are a small number of players at Beezid who have really large bid accounts, and go “all in” in “Early Bird” auctions. On occasion, there are substantial clashes between these bidders, and head-to-head battles will go into the hundreds of dollars. The best strategy for the typical Beezid player in an “Early Bird” auction is to know who the “mega bidders” are, stay away from them, and play in the auctions they do not tag.

For the most part, the “mega bidders” tag the auctions early, and do not jump auctions. However, there are some experienced bidders who will jump auctions. Before you go “all in,” you need to study the closed auction pages carefully and watch the site carefully. (If you see a bidder who used 1000 bids to win an auction at $35, you know that bidder jumped the auction.) I also recommend following the discussion on FaceBook. The good news for players who are interested in participating the “Early Bird” auctions that are part of this promotion, is that they will have the important information available to them: closed auction pages from the blitz auctions, which will tell them how many bids many players used to win auctions. Bear in mind, though, that these players have more bids, potentially substantially more bids, than what it took for them to win a particular blitz auction.

Now, what does Beezid’s latest promotion has to do with my train wreck of a loss, you might ask at this point? Quite a lot, actually. My 4000-bid disaster occurred chasing a Kindle in an "Early Bird" auction, and I lost the auction when I did because of an equipment malfunction. Here is what happened:

Following Beezid’s Superbowl Blitz, I had a decent amount of bids. I also enjoyed my first HDTV win. I hoped to win another television at the next blitz, so I wanted to conserve my bids in the meantime. I also was fortunate enough to win a couple bid packs, including a 1000 bid pack, so my account was fairly strong.

But my bidding philosophy was seriously flawed, I just did not know it at the time. I had somehow got it in my head that I needed to pursue a strategy in which if I decided to put my toe in the auction – even with a single bid – then I needed to go all the way and win the auction, no matter what. Yeah, writing it down now, months after the fact, it sounds dumb to me as well. But that was my strategy. I was committed to it, so much so that when technical issues contributed to an auction loss for a $200 Amazon card, I was not upset about the fact that I had used more than 1200 bids in that auction. But was I beside myself that I showed up as the second to last bidder on the closed auction page.

With my strategic thinking this constipated, and my desire to conserve bids and my fear of ever losing an auction dominating my decision making, I ended up in the early bird auctions. I enjoyed success. I won.

For two weeks.

And then the Kindle auction. My strategy for early bird auctions was to avoid the “mega bidder” tags, but the Kindle was a little different because it was a “thriller” auction. This just means no auto bidder – each bid needs to be manually entered. My plan for the auction was to throttle the auction, to manually auto bid it, to dissuade any “mega bidder” from entering, and I anticipated that I would outlast anybody who attempted to jump the auction because at that point I had in excess of 4000 bids, and Kindles could be won at regular auctions without too much difficulty. I figured that rational behavior would prevent somebody from jumping an auction and put their bids at risk at $100 in a worst-case scenario, when they saw I was committed to the auction and they could win the item with less of an investment in a regular auction.

The plan’s first phase worked. I kept the mega bidders out.

But the auction got jumped. By two bidders. By the time they jumped the auction, I was already committed to it, and had long stopped thinking about the Kindle, and was only thinking about getting the 2000 or so bids I had already used. Hours into the auction, the timer shortened to five seconds. There really isn’t a good way to describe what it is like to click a button over and over for hours. It feels like a 1950s social psychology experiment gone awry. Your back hurts. Your hand hurts. But at the same time, you are in a near hypnotic rhythm with the timer. In all events, it is not fun. It’s also not good for the computer equipment. The relentless clicking finally took its toll on my computer’s mouse. It literally had enough at around $70, and stopped reliably casting the bids. I switched to one of my back ups, my iPad.

As the auction approached $90, I felt I had my opponents on the ropes. The timer started ticking down closer to zero more, and because a Beezid 5-second timer is a very difficult thing to manage, particularly without an auto bidder (something to keep in mind for the blitz), I felt at the time I was getting the upper hand.

And then it happened. I remember it vividly, as if it were yesterday. I was sitting back in my chair. Throttling the “Bid” button on my iPad. Bang, bang, bang. Over and over. The bid didn’t register. The timer continued to count down with my opponent’s name as the high bidder.

My iPad had “selected” the bid button for cutting and pasting. It wasn’t green. It was blue.

Frantically, I reached for my mouse, but it wouldn’t register the bid, and I watched on my computer as the “Bid” button turned from green to the gray “Sold” button.

I sat speechless and still for a moment. I gave the iPad a hard look. I couldn’t believe it.

I had lost.

And not just lost the auction. I had lost my entire strategy, my plan of conserving bids for the Easter promotion. I had lost my investment. But I lost the auction as well. If losing the Amazon auction was bad, this I couldn’t even fathom through the framework of my old thinking.

And that’s when I had my breakthrough. I realized that this wasn’t a horrible moment as I took stock of it, quite the opposite in fact. This was funny. Not "belly laugh funny" by any means, but there was certainly a good deal of humor in the fact that at the end of the day my iPad did me in, because it picked $95.19 to select the bid button for cutting and pasting.

I had always preached two basic points: always have fun, and always stay within your limits. I realized I had only practiced one of them, the “staying within your limits” point. I believed then, and still believe, that once you buy the bid, the money has already been spent; that if you are spending more on bids that you can afford, or are losing more than you are able or comfortable losing, then you need to seriously reevaluate what you are doing. Now!

But as I found my Kindle loss increasingly humorous, I realized I had completely failed in the second point. I was fine with the bid loss, because it part of the risk, and I firmly believe (and believe it bears repeating) that you should never put at risk bids that you are not comfortable losing. But my Win-At-All-Costs-And-Win-Every-Time strategy was strangling the fun out of it. Auctions were becoming about stress, not fun. I was winning auctions, sure. But I wasn’t taking chances. I wasn’t experimenting. I wasn’t learning. To my surprise, I felt a sense of relief, and I had no idea where that was coming from or why I felt it.

With the bids I had left, I jumped back in, but this time without any of the hang-ups or concerns that had overshadowed my approach and clouded my thinking. To my surprise, not only did I truly begin to enjoy it, but I started to see things I had missed before. I started to really learn.

As I paced my house in the moments immediately after my equipment malfunction gave the auction to one of my opponents, I thought it was all over for me, and I was at peace with that. I did have some regret. I was disappointed, because I had wanted to win for my kids diamond earrings, and I had wanted to win at the next blitz an HDTV. I had been too afraid to try for an HDTV in a regular auction, as a by-product of my win-it-at-all-costs approach. In fact, this fear is what drove me to put my entire investment at risk in the first place.

As I jumped back in for what I thought would be my final splash, I won both pairs of earrings within days of the Kindle auction. And a week later, the TV I had been basically too afraid to go after in a regular auction fear of tarnishing my perfect auction record? I won it for less than 200 bids the first time I tried for it.

Moving forward, I realized that fear of losing can be paralyzing. I don’t look to lose, and I don’t play recklessly. I still approach every auction with the desire to win. And I come into every auction with a plan to win. Every bid should be used to win or contribute to a win, that’s no different. (If you ever bid for another reason, that’s a separate problem.) But what I learned from my kindle experience was to disengage fear and anxiety from my auction experience. In doing so, I opened my eyes to literally tons of information I was missing. I stopped unduly restricting myself from competing in auctions that I started winning. Most importantly, I started truly having fun.

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