Free February Stats!

Many people have looked at my Purchase Beezid Stats web page and wondered how useful the data is and if it’s really worth the $6.00 I ask on that page.  I’ve decided to put up the stats for the entire month of February for free so everyone can examine the stats for themselves and make  their own judgments.

Simply click on the following link and you can download an Excel spreadsheet with all of the auction data for February, 2011 from Beezid that I have done the work of collecting for you.  There is data in that file for over three thousand auctions, data that would take you weeks to collect on your own.  I also have the data in a text file format that you can use to import the data into Excel yourself if you’d like or to simply use NotePad or WordPad to browse on your own if you do not have Excel or a comparable spreadsheet program.  If you would prefer the text file version, please e-mail me at BeezidTipster@gmail.com.

Click the link to Download: Beezid Stats – February 2011

Now that you have that file, what kind of data can you get from it?  There are a lot of things you can do with this data.  I’ll present a few examples here to get you started.

Frequent Winners

Want to see who has won the most auctions in the month of February?  No problem!  Here are the steps using Excel 2007:

1) Load up the spreadsheet you just downloaded in Excel.
2) Click on the “Insert” tab.
3) Click PivotTable.
4) Click OK on the dialog box.
5) Check Winners Alias and Description on the list that comes up on the right.

That should get you some nice data that looks like this:

From there you can browse through and see the Descriptions of every auction each person has won in the month of February!  That wasn’t so hard, was it?  Now, what if you just want to know how many auctions each person has won?  Easy!

1) Drag Description from the “Row Labels” section to the “Values” section in the lower-right of the screen

That’s it.  You now can see how many auctions each person has won.  If you want to sort the data:

2) Click on the “Home” tab.
3) Click on the “Count of Description” column in your spreadsheet.
4) Click “Sort & Filter” in the top right and then select “Sort Largest to Smallest”.

That’s it!  Now you have a sorted list of all of the winners and how many times they won in the month of February.  That list should look something like this:

Power Bidders

Want to see who tends to use a huge number of bids to power people out of auctions so you can stay away from them?  Also very easy to do!  Assuming you followed the steps above, just do this now:

1) Check Winners Total Bid Count as well in the field list on the right hand side of the screen.
2) Drag Description back from “Values” to “Row Labels”.
3) Drag Winners Total Bid Count  from “Row Labels” to “Values”.

And, you’re done!  Now you can see how many bids each winner used per auction and their total bid count.  Let’s see what that looks like:

This data is very valuable if you want to know who you’re up against and what it takes to win auctions.  I hope you can see that not only is this information useful, it’s really pretty easy to use as well.  Please check out my Purchase Beezid Stats page every couple of weeks to see what new data is available.  Pick it up cheap and use it to win auctions over people who do not have this same data at their disposal.  Knowledge is power, after all.

Happy Bidding!

Prime Time

People often wonder what times of day or days of the week offer the lowest prices on Beezid items.  This blog post is going to try to help answer that question by looking at the prime bidding times.

Beginners, and even experienced bidders, often wonder if certain items sell at lower prices at different times of the day or days of the week.  To try to come up with an answer, I’ve analyzed data from the past three months of auctions, from the beginning of July to the beginning of October.  I chose to focus on $100 Gift Cards as these are fairly frequent and should have a good sampling of data.  My data consists of 323 auctions from the given time period.  For each auction, I looked at the final Sales Price and the Closing Date of the auction.  One final note:  All times/dates are based on Pacific Time as that is my time zone and I prefer to view data in a way that helps me.  🙂  Sorry for those on the East Coast (or elsewhere) that need to do some slight conversions.

So, let’s look at how the average Sales Price varied by the Day of the Week alone.

Not surprisingly, Fridays and Saturdays tend to have higher prices.  What is surprising is how high the auction prices on Wednesday seem to be.  Also, note how low the sales prices are on Sundays and Mondays.

Now let’s take a look at how Sales Price varied by Time of Day.  For this metric, I split the day out into six segments of four hours each and took a look at the numbers.  Here they are.

As expected, the late night/early morning hours tend to give the best prices.  However, you may not have expected that the highest prices are during the work day!  So, for those of you who only come home and bid after work, never fear!

Putting this all together, you should combine the best days of the week with the best times of day and you’ll find auctions that close at much lower prices than average.  For this sample data, the average sales price from 12:00 AM – 4:00 AM Sunday was $5.66 compared with $13.22 from 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM on a Wednesday.

Also, keep in mind, that knowing when an auction is going to close is key to your success.  If you can anticipate that certain times/days will have auctions closing at lower prices, you can take that into account in your bidding by jumping in a bit earlier than normal or by watching the auction closely when the price is lower than what you would normally pay attention to.  Similarly if the auction seems like it will close at a higher than normal price, you can avoid the auction until later in the bidding and save yourself some bids.

As usual, any comments or feedback are definitely welcome!

Winning an Auction

Hello!  The most common question people ask about Beezid is: “How do I actually win an auction?”  This blog post is going to explore that topic by first answering the question:  “When do auctions end?”

First, I hope you read my earlier blog post Getting Started.  If so, you should have watched several auctions by now and you should understand in detail how the various bidding mechanisms work, such as Autobeezid and Sniping.  If you’ve paid attention, you’ll see that there is a key difference between how a penny auction ends compared to a traditional auction.  Penny auctions end when no one else bids on the auction before the clock runs out, just like a traditional auction.  However, unlike a traditional auction, a penny auction virtually always ends at a price where all the bidders are still willing to buy the item.  This is a key point so make sure you understand it:  People do not stop bidding on penny auctions because the price is too high.

To start with, you should be able to figure out roughly how many people are participating in an auction at any given time.  Beezid shows you the last ten bids at all times, as in the example auction in the image.  This often isn’t enough to give you the exact participation level, but that list plus you paying attention for several minutes prior, should give you a great indication of how many people are bidding at any given time.  In this example, just a quick glance at the chart tells me that there are eight unique bidders out of the last ten bids so the auction is still looking pretty lively.

So, what makes people stop bidding on penny auctions?  Understanding this is a great way to learn how to win.  If you can bid at a time when others have stopped bidding, you’re very likely to win!  There are a large number of reasons people might stop (or not start) bidding on auctions.  Let’s look at a few of these:

1. They don’t want to continually out-bid an AutoBeezid.
2. Their sniper bids have run out.
3. The price seems too low.
4. There are too many people bidding.
5. They run out of bids or have used more bids than they want to spend on the auction.
6. They get tired or run out of patience.

Let’s run through these in a little more detail.

#1 – They don’t want to continually out-bid an AutoBeezid.

If a bidder has set multiple AutoBeezids or just one very large AutoBeezid on an auction you want to win, it can be very frustrating, especially if you are the main person outbidding the AutoBeezider.   In addition, most people stop bidding against AutoBeezids, expecting someone else to do the outbidding for them.  Often, there will be three or four people who bid frequently during an AutoBeezid, trying to exhaust the AutoBeezids and get back to regular bidding.  However, if no one is helping and one person has to bear the burden of the outbidding alone, they may soon tire of it or decide to use their bids elsewhere.  This is one reason why AutoBeezids are so powerful if used correctly.

#2 – Their sniper bids have run out.

Often times many of the bidders in an auction aren’t really active participants at all.  These bidders are people who have set an AutoBeezid for some higher price and have snipers set to make sure the auction stays active until their AutoBeezid price is met.  After some time, these sniper bids will run out.  Many times they will run out before the AutoBeezid executes, eliminating those bidders from having an affect on the auction results if the auction closes at a lower-than-expected price point.  Take some time to try to determine who is sniping and who isn’t.  This will help you see who you really need to outbid and help you save bids that can’t win because there are too many snipers still active.

#3 – The price seems too low.

Many people do not bid because the auction price is too low.  The logic is that other bidders will likely drive the price up anyway and any early bidding is likely to be a waste of bids.  Sometimes this is true and sometimes it is not.  Certainly if everyone subscribed to this philosophy, it would take just one person to bid when the auction is low to get the auction to end.  Everyone else would be waiting for a higher price!

#4 – There are too many people bidding.

If there are many active bidders, many people avoid joining an auction because it isn’t an efficient use of bids to go up against a large number of people.  However, sometimes this causes an unexpected result.  Since so many people are bidding, all of the active bidders may also assume one of the other bidders will bid, and the auction may very well close with no one placing another bid.

#5 – They run out of bids or have used more bids than they want to spend on the auction.

This one is fairly straight-forward.  If a bidder runs out of bids, they’re not going to participate in the auction any further.  Of course, there’s no way to tell if your bidding opponent has run out of bids, but you can try to keep track of how many bids they’ve used in the auction.  Even if they haven’t run out, most people aren’t going to spend 500 bids to win a $50.00 item because this will be losing them money.

#6 – They get tired or run out of patience.

Auctions can take a long time to end, especially for higher-priced items.  Often a bidder may have to go to sleep, leave the house, or otherwise be unable to spend the hours needed to win an auction.  This is also something important to keep in mind:  If you don’t have the time needed to give yourself a good chance of winning the auction, don’t bid on it.  Make sure you have set aside a long time to allow for you to bid with a proper strategy.

Conclusion

As a beginner, you should try to look for these signs and determine when an auction is close to ending due to any of the criteria listed above.  The great part is that you don’t always even need to know exactly why people have stopped bidding: You just need to know they have.  Once the number of bidders seems to be dwindling, pounce on the auction!  However, if the auction doesn’t end shortly thereafter and more bidders join, consider waiting until later to try again or abandoning the auction altogether.  You can’t always win and it’s not worth wasting bids at inopportune moments.

As an intermediate or advanced bidder, in addition to looking at the signs above for bidding opportunities, you should be using strategy to create the opportunities.  Perhaps it is your well-timed AutoBeezid that made several bidders abandon the auction.  Maybe the bids you saved early on in the auction are allowing you to bid later and make other bidders tire of the extended length of the auction.

I hope this was useful to you and I plan to add even more tips on how to win auctions and explain some of the above concepts in more depth in future blog posts!

Money Management

This blog post deals with a popular topic, money.  Obviously, if you are buying and spending all of your bids without winning any auctions, you’re losing money.  But, if you are winning auctions, are you ahead?  If so, by how much?  Many people seem to not have a good sense of how much they are really making or losing on Beezid.  This article, then, will try to help with this problem.  After all, if you can’t tell if you’re ahead or behind, you’re probably losing money.  🙂

Let’s take a common scenario.  Assume you just signed up for Beezid and already used up your 10 Free Bids.  You then purchase a 50 Bid Pack at a fixed price of $40.00 from the Buy Bids menu.  Later you manage to win a $50 Gift Card for $7.50, spending 15 bids to do so.  You then get even luckier (or use expert strategy, of course) and win a $100 Gift Card for $15, using 23 more bids.  At this point, you’ve used only 38 of your 50 bids and won two decent gift cards.  How far ahead are you?  The answer depends on how you calculate it.

Beezid will take the sales price of the item, count each bid you used to win at $0.60, and determine your savings percentage.  This seems perfectly reasonable except for two things.  One is that Beezid does not count shipping and handling costs into that figure.  The other is that your performance on this auction does not change how much you already spent on your bids.  Using the example above, let’s look at Beezid’s numbers:

Item	Sales Price	Bids Used	Cost of Bids	Total Item Cost	Total Item Savings
$50 Gift Card	$7.50	15	$9.00	$16.50	$33.50
$100 Gift Card	$15.00	23	$13.80	$28.80	$71.20
Totals	$22.50	38	$22.80	$45.30	$104.70

So, according to Beezid’s numbers, you have a profit of $104.70 on those items.  Let’s add shipping and handling costs to the table.

 

Item	Sales Price	Bids Used	Cost of Bids	Delivery Costs	Total Item Cost	Total Item Savings
$50 Gift Card	$7.50	15	$9.00	$6.99	$23.49	$26.51
$100 Gift Card	$15.00	23	$13.80	$6.99	$35.79	$64.21
Totals	$22.50	38	$22.80	$13.98	$59.28	$90.72

Now, the math shows a profit of $90.72 on the same items.  Either way, it looks like a pretty hefty profit.  However, I tend to find per-item totals like this misleading because it doesn’t really tell me how much money I’ve spent compared to what I’ve received in return.  Note that in this particular case, Beezid is assuming I spent $0.60 per bid when I actually spent $0.70 per bid, making my savings even less.  On the other hand, as the site happily points out, if I had spent less per bid (say $0.50) my savings would be more.  For me, I don’t want to have to think about that.  I want to know, at all times, how much money I’ve spent, period.  So, let’s look at this table.

Item	Sales Price	Bids Used	Delivery Costs	Total Item Cost	Total Item Savings
50 Bid Pack	$40.00	0	$0.00	$40.00	$-40.00
$50 Gift Card	$7.50	15	$6.99	$14.49	$35.51
$100 Gift Card	$15.00	23	$6.99	$21.99	$78.01
Totals	$62.50	38	$13.98	$76.48	$73.52

So, what’s happened here?  I’ve removed the cost per bid from the table and simply listed the exact amount I paid for each item.  I also count my Bid Pack purchase as its own entry and subtract anything I spent on bids from my total savings amount.  This tells me that, as of this moment, my profit is actually only $73.52.  Now, I still have 12 bids left.  If I win something with those bids, I add that item to the table, summing up the sales price and the delivery costs, and I would then have an even greater net profit/savings.  If I use those last 12 bids and don’t win anything, the amount I already calculated is correct.  It’s that last piece that is very hard to track with the Beezid system.

I hope this example helped some people in better understanding how much money they are really making (or losing).  I welcome any comments!