Complaint Rating:

Company information:
swoopo
United Kingdom

To show my experiences with this site I have included my complaints and a reply from the site involved.

My first complaint:
I feel like i just got ripped off. I was bidding in this auction and i was
showing as the current bidder with a red 9 seconds remaining on the clock. i never
took my eyes off the screen and all of a sudden the auction ended and someone else
had won.during the 9 seconds i bid again just in case and was told i was the
current bidder. this doesnt seem right as i had used up about 30 quids worth of bids.

Their reply:
Hi Robert,

Thanks for taking the time to get in touch.

Occasionally, users tell us that even though they bid before the countdown ended
on their browser, their bids did not get placed and the auction ends. In these
instances, the most likely explanation is so-called "Internet lag times". These
are time-delays in the transfer of data between your PC and our servers. Mostly
those delays (lags) occur because single parts of the internet connection are
overloaded.

This, unfortunately, is a general problem with the internet.

There are a few ways of helping minimise this problem:

* While bidding on Swoopo do not download large data such as video or audio files
from the internet.
* Don't send emails with large attachments while bidding on Swoopo.
* Make sure that no other users such as family members, etc. are using the
internet while you are bidding.

I'm very sorry your bid wasn't registered by the Swoopo servers in time. To be
absolutely certain that you avoid the problem of "Internet lag times" don't leave
your bidding until the last second, or better still, use the BidButler
to place your bids. You might be interested in reading more about internet lag
times on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_lag.

I hope this clears things up, but if not, please don't hesitate to get back in
touch. You'll also find lots of helpful information at http://uk.swoopo.com/help.html

-Julie


Swoopo UK customer support.

My response:
I was not downloading at the time and i had no other applications running. Although i have another computer connected in my house, it was not being used on the internet. My bid did register but in the space of about 9 seconds the bid jumped from around 88.50 gbp to 90.00 gbp all the time showing me as the current bidder and then changed to auction ended, i then thought i was the winner until the congratulations appeared with another bidders name.
If this is a common problem there must be a large number of people wasting their money bidding on items.
No reply as yet.
My second complaint:
Further to my recent complaint:
I decided to bid on item 128331
I made sure I had no other applications running on my computer and that no other computer in the house was connected to the internet and began to bid.
The item had loads of bidders but there were about 12 bidding constantly. The winner started bidding only a few minutes before the auction ended. I had only placed 18 bids. the winner placed 17. The other regular bidders had placed many more bids. Most of these were still bidding when the auction ended, myself included. I infact tried to click on 3 seconds but the timer jumped to zero as i clicked and the auction ended. I do not believe for one second that all the other bidders dropped out at the same time.
There is definitely something wrong here and I will be very surprised if there aren't a lot of dissatisfied bidders at this moment.
I will now attempt to make contact with other members via the internet to find out about their experiences with the site, before making any other complaint, and to help me decide if membership is worthwhile.
No reply as yet.
This company state they can afford to sell the items cheap because there is a charge of 40p for each bid made. the bids in general go up by 8p at a time but there are also penny auctions. This means that if something worth 200 quid sells for 100 quid it will have had either 1250 bids in the case of the 8p auction at a total cost of 500 quid to the bidders. Add that to the 100 quid the winner has to pay and they get 600 quid for a 200 quid retail priced item. In a penny auction they would get 4 grand in bids, plus the 100 selling price for the same item.
You would think that with this massive profit they could at least refund my bids or give me the option of buying the item at the winning price, they have plenty of them to sell.