You should read the updated Deal Dash scam article for an in depth analysis of how DealDash is stealing your money
You’ve seen the commercials where people on DealDash claim to buy high end electronics for ridiculously low prices: IPads for $10, Laptops for $20, etc. Are these deals too good to be true? The short answer is, no, DealDash is not a scam. But that really depends on how you use the site.
If you consider DealDash as a store where you give them $20 and they hand you a brand new IPhone then the truth is that will *Never* happen. If you log onto DealDash today and try to buy a new phone through bidding, you will almost certainly pay more than the phone is worth through paying for bids. And that’s the trick they never mention on the commercials: You have to pay money ahead of time each time you want to bid on an item, and that money isn’t included in the $20 final price for that hot item.
Using this website, letsgobidding.com, I can see that the Last IPhone X sold for $537.64, with bidding going on for 5 consecutive days! That means there were 53,764 total bids. If we assume that everyone bought their bids on sale for the cheapest 12 cents a bid then at least $6,451 went into that auction, and then some lucky person had the privilege to pay more money again to actually buy the thing. In this case DealDash earned about 700% what the phone is actually worth.
Clearly from this perspective DealDash is a scam that you shouldn’t bother with. Why should you pay so much money for miniscule chance that you will actually win? But there is more to DealDash than that they are evidently making a ton of money off of suckers.
DealDash is best viewed as a form of risk taking gambling. In some ways it is similar to the lottery. You pay money for the chance to win. The more money you put in the higher the chance of you winning. In the end, most people win absolutely nothing. But some people do win. DealDash is different from the lottery in that there is more strategy than picking random numbers, and that strategy is the major difference between the winners and the losers.
In each game of chance there is information hidden from you that keeps the odds of winning against you. For the lottery, if you knew the winning numbers you could win instantly. In poker, if you knew every player’s hands you would already know who is going to win before the end of the round. For slot machines it would be how many spins until the machine pays out. Some of this information is random and there is no way to know what it will be ahead of time without inventing a time machine. Other times it is not as random. A talented poker player can guess their opponent’s hands by carefully studying their behavior. A blackjack player can try to count cards to give an edge in the probability of the next card.
Without any strategy the odds in DealDash are strongly against you. For the IPhone, there were 255 bidders competing against each other, with only one being able to win. Additionally, out of 53878 bids, only one will be the winner: the last one. Roughly that leaves you with the odds at 1:255 that you will win, and 1:53878 that your bid will be the winning one, or 0.39% and 0.0019% respectively. Those odds are terrible and it would be impossible to win anything with those. But we can improve those odds significantly if we understand one thing. What is the information hidden from us preventing an easy win?
Players on DealDash know that it’s very unlikely any one bid is going to win an item for them, with the odds so low with individual bids. To compensate they queue up hundreds or thousands of bids to increase their odds of winning. The only way to know if any single bid is going to be the winner is to know exactly how much everyone you’re bidding against is going to bid. Let’s say you’re bidding against two players, one is a cautions new player and will only put 100 bids into that IPhone before giving up, the other is a dedicated bidder willing to put down 5000 bids. If you knew that you probably wouldn’t start bidding on that auction! It would take you forever trying to edge out that dedicated bidder. Not to mention the 5000 bids you’d need to win are awfully expensive to buy ahead of time.
With that information you could easily know which auctions are close to their end, where you could swoop in and win them at a great price without wasting too many bids. And you would know which auctions aren’t worth your time because someone is trying too hard to win and still has a lot of bidding left. While you will never know that exact of information there are ways to get an approximation of what sort of bidder you are going against.
I am alluding of course to historical information for every auction and user on DealDash. Wouldn’t it be useful if you could look back on each user’s bid history and see where they gave up after 100 bids or kept on bidding through 10,000? If you knew which ones were the high rollers and which ones were skittish to put in the big numbers, then you’d have a pretty significant advantage in winning auctions. Now you can have all that information for the low low price of: NOTHING! It’s all free on letsgobidding.com, no signing up or credit card information required. Other sites charge you as much as $30 a month to look at this same information and I’m giving it away for free. You’re right, I am a nice person. Happy Bidding!