If You're Not Going To Use The Buy It Now Option, Here's How To Be Smart About It

Ok, so let’s face it, you can lose  a lot of money bidding in penny auctions if you aren’t careful. DealDash offers the buy-it-now feature allowing you to bid, then purchase the item for the stated retail price and get all of the bids you placed in the auction back. This is a really great, no – really awesome offering. If DealDash didn’t have buy it now you wouldn’t be able to do this and all of the bids you place, unless you’re the winning bidder, would really have been lost. So what do you do if you don’t want to use buy-it-now, but just a few bids here and there?
 
How do you bid smart if you don’t want to “buy it now?” There’s a few ways you could go about bidding in penny auctions without losing a lot of money if you aren’t prepared to spend the retail to buy the item.
1. Set Limits  & Keep Track It’s smart to set a limit of how many bids you will be willing to spend/and in effect, lose, if you aren’t the winner. Make sure you set a number before you start bidding and limit yourself to this number, or else it’s very easy to continue to buy bid pack after bid pack and spend more money than you wanted to when you aren’t prepared to or willing to actually buy the item. Say it’s a $1000 laptop, you really want to win it, but at a discount, you don’t want to buy it.. so set a number: say $100… and be comfortable with that amount and bid accordingly.
2. Bid Smart: Get to know your fellow bidders  Though not always easy, I cannot stress enough the importance of “getting to know” your competition. How do you do this? DealDash has a few ways to tell you more about a bidder. 1.) On the item page for each auction as soon as an opponent bids it will also provide you with a few pieces of information: For instance, user “Diannas” is currently bidding in the auction for the Comic Images BackPack Buddies Yoda.
backpack buddiesWhen she bids this info shows up under her username:

Winning limit status: 3 / 6
Member since: 10/10/2012 Resident of: Indiana
Note how it shows her winning limit status and how long she’s been a member. By looking at this info you can kind of get a feel for their experience. If they’ve won before perhaps they have a strategy for bidding, maybe they “go all in” and use buy it now, or maybe they just get lucky a few times. Also, seeing as Diannas has been a member for nearly a year-and-a-half perhaps she’s a pretty experienced bidder as opposed to someone who just joined today and maybe just be trying to win with their first bid pack.
3. Bid Carefully
In order to bid carefully you must not bid carelessly. This means do not just throw away all of your bids in a few short minutes. Watch and see how many other bidders have been bidding before you start bidding… Don’t just all of a sudden jump in and waste your bids by “bid throttling” – continuously bidding over another bidder. Other bidders that were just bidding didn’t disappear, and they still have their bids, but will you have yours?
4. Use BidBuddy
Let the computer bid for you – use bid buddy: Using BidBuddy to Win DealDash Auctions and Save Money.

So really it’s easy to be smart about bidding. Just pay attention, set limits and get to know who you are bidding against and you will be on your way to bidding smarter, even if you’re not using buy it now.
Do you have DealDash tips that you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments section! Thanks!