Telebid - German Ebay alternative
TeleBid, basically, works like Ebay in the sense that users bid for products and the highest bidder wins the auction. On this website, however, users can follow life auctions in real-time. This means a clock is displayed below every product counting minutes and seconds, and users can bid until 1 second before the end of the auction. Once a bid is made 20 seconds are added to the clock giving it the feel of a life auction.
Now the big difference to Ebay is that on TeleBid, every bid costs 0.50€ and has to be pre-purchased. Additionally to making single bids manually, users can set up a BidButler to make bids for them when they do not have time to bid themselves. The BidButler can be set up to only bid between a pre-determined price range and users can also select how many bids the program can make; keeping in mind that every bid is charged with 0.50€. To bid strategically, however, TeleBid advises its users to use a combination of manual single bids and the BidButler.
Another difference to Ebay and other auctioning websites is that users can bid via telephone. The 0.50€ per bid will then be added to the phone bill.
Also, users can only bid on products set up for auction by TeleBid. Users cannot sell their own products.
January 31st, 2008 at 11:29 am
How it works…
In order to understand the heavy criticism and controversy that Telebid caused in its home country it is necessary to understand the basic concept of the whole thing, i.e. how Telebid works. I’ll do my best to explain.
Telebid sells brand new stu…
January 31st, 2008 at 10:32 pm
[...] Une DS neuve pour 10 £ ! Motivant, non ? (vu sur le blog de LetsBuyIt) [...]
February 20th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
A highly recommended site is elfingo.com for online auctions. They are the new ebay. Many smaller sites like this offer buyers far better deals than ebay ever could. Buyser also save a ton because this site charges little or nothing depending on the day. One more reaso I like elfingo.com is because they don’t take a part of the sale at all. No commissions or final value fees. A+++ http://www.elfingo.com
March 24th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Telebid is basically a gambling site, rather than an auction site. You may be lucky, and get the item you want for less than the retail price. But the real winner in most auctions is …. Telebid. Suppose a Wii sells for £100, rather than £180. They will get the £100 purchase price - plus the value of all the bids to get it to that price. At 10p increase each time, that’s 1000 bids at 50p each - £500 worth of bids.
You are a sucker if you use Telebid. Either that, or if you have a “system”, then you are prepared to exploit other suckers - which isn’t much better.
March 25th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Well a business model is a business model. if the people use it and they pay less than the average retail price, fair enough. I think that it is an interesting concept.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:51 am
[...] having previously reported (blog post here) about Telebid we now read in the FAZ that apparently Telebid has not only expanded to the UK and [...]
July 8th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
[...] haben wir einen Artikel über Telebid geschrieben (um diesen Beitrag zu lesen, klicken Sie bitte hier) und jetzt haben wir in der FAZ gelesen, daβ Telebid nicht nur nach Spanien und Großbritannien [...]
July 10th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
[...] vous avions précédemment signalé l’arrivée de Telebid sur le net (cf.blogpost), et nous avons récemment lu dans le FAZ (quotidien allemand) que Telebid ne se limiterait [...]