telebid.com > Reviews > Telebid Testicles (AKA Swooping Swollocks)

Author's product rating:   

Layout & Design	Good
Navigation	Good
How fast is this website?	Very fast
Quality of the Content	Good
Range of Services / Products	Good selection

Advantages:	Great products at  * potentially *  great prices
Disadvantages:	Lots of money spent and no product won yet

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

*** Update 25 September 2008 ***

For some reason known best only to the Directors, who probably came up with this idea while they were drunk, Telebid is no longer called Telebid.

Clearly, after consuming a bit too much Penderyn, they decided the Telebid was just a useless name. But, rather than using my nattily thought up name of 'sevenbid.com' below, they came up with an even more useless name:

Swoopo

*** Original Review ***

I really want a PlayStation 3. I want one so badly I actually want one more than I want to get down and dirty with Jennifer Aniston and, to be fair, I want that so badly I would actually sell my right testicle in order to achieve it. So, logically, I'm going to have to sell the left one to get a PS3.

Or, at least, that was the way I was thinking before I discovered Telebid.com. This website swung into the view of my monitor in such a seductive way that, momentarily, I was lost for words. Its clean white screen and logo designed by viewers of Nickelodeon seduced me quicker and more effectively than Angelina Jolie pinching Brad away from poor Jen, and I dumped eBay just as quickly.

You see, while the shops are still selling PlayStation 3 consoles for something akin to NASA's annual fuel bill, you can pick one up on eBay for about three hundred quid. Which, when I think about it, isn't really that much cheaper than the retail price in your local Currys.Digital. On Telebid.com, however, one sold this morning for just £24.78. Excuse my French, ladies, but what a f***ing bargain.

A few weeks ago I started looking in to the website in more detail and, over a cup of coffee in my Ferrari mug, I thought to myself "why the hell didn't I think of this?" I plucked the picture of Jennifer Aniston (cut from Hello magazine) off the corner of my monitor, removed the piece of blutac that had been holding it there, kissed her papery cheek daintily - and threw her in the bin. For less than twenty five quid I could have a PlayStation 3 without the need to sell either of my testicles and, at that price, I'd happily forego sex with a starlet from the last decade.

Yes, yawn... Telebid.com is yet another auction site you can use on the Interweb to buy stuff cheaply. Only this one works differently. While we all sit around watching eBay auctions and trying to bid in the last five seconds in the hopes that we'll beat somebody to a bargain, Telebid.com simply offers you the bargains by making you pay for bidding. It's quite a simple concept, really: each time you push the 'bid' button, it costs you 50p. This prevents people from putting in random bids that they have no intention of paying for, as they quite often do on eBay, just to help raise the final price higher. If you have no intention of buying a product on Telebid.com, you're just wasting 50p each time you push the bid button.

The other big difference is that you don't put the price in that you want to pay; each time you push the 'bid' button, the price of the item increases by 7p. A rather arbitrary figure, I grant you, but it is sort of cool, too. The other thing that happens is that seven seconds is added to the remaining time of the auction. This prevents people from putting in last minute bids in the hopes of gazumping you and leads me to the conclusion that the site should have been called sevenbid.com instead. (It's worth pointing out here that telebid.com says the price rises by 10p unless it's an International auction, at which point it rises by 7p (the rough conversion in euros from 10 cents) but I have yet to see anything other than an International auction listed.)

Confused? I was, too, but I persevered and here is what essentially happens: an item is listed on the website (let's say it's a PlayStation 3, for argument's sake) at the stunningly cheap price of £0.43p and with a time remaining on the auction of four hours. You keep an eye on that auction, either by repeatedly visiting the site or by using the auction watchlist feature. As the auction nears its end the price might have risen to the heady heights of £4.36. You decide that, with ten seconds left, you'll bid for the PS3, so you push the 'bid' button. The price rises to £4.41 and there are now seventeen seconds of the auction remaining... It's quite simple, really.

Telebid's a reasonably new website, so their product list isn't vast - yet. They're still growing it, but right now you can buy Games Consoles, mobile phones, laptops (a Toshiba Satellite Pro just finished for £23.17) vacuum cleaners, coffee machines and so on. Simply select the category of item you wish to bid for and the website will show you what's available, what's coming, what's ended - and how much you could potentially save. (A 40" Sony Bravia LCD finished this morning at just £66.64 when the actual retail price is £1'499.99. Phew.)

Getting the gist of it now? Want to take part? It's dead simple: simply register your details and buy a bid-pack; they come in packs of 20, 50, 100 and 200 bids, prices starting from a tenner to £100.00 and all effectively meaning that each bid costs you half a quid. Once you've purchased the bid-pack of your choice you're ready to go bidding.

And the site is quite a delight to use. Its layout is clean and relatively effective and very easy to view and the pages update and refresh quickly. On the main home page it shows you which auctions are about to end and lists some others that are live that might be of interest to you, or you can go to your "My Telebid" page, which tells you how many bids you have left (obviously they go down by one each time you bid) and what auctions you are either bidding on or watching.

It's so simple, clean and such a refreshing idea that I almost wee'd in my shell suit when I realised I might be able to have a PS3 for almost no money. What's even better is that there is no need to stay up until the early hours of the morning hoping you'll beat your competitors because they'll have yawned and gone to bed, because telebid.com cleverly pauses all auctions at midnight and continues them again at 7am from exactly where they were suspended. You can get a good night's rest in those seven hours and nobody can nick your goods.

All items are brand new, delivered to your door and come complete with a manufacturer's warranty. Apparently. I wouldn't know, however, because - and this is where telebid.com slips up completely for me - I haven't yet managed to win anything on it. But I've spent a small fortune trying to.

As with all auctions you should set yourself limits, figure out how much you're prepared to pay and not go over that limit. It's a simple strategy, let down by the fact that you get caught up in the emotion of winning something really expensive for just twenty pounds that you forget it's costing you 50p each time you push the button. Before you know it, your hundred pounds worth of bids has run out and, by the time you've dug your credit card out and bought some more, the auction has invariably ended and you have to start all over again with a fresh one.

And then it depends on what time of day or day of week that you're doing this on. You see, you can actually win the items cheaply on a Monday morning, when everybody else has gone to work, but try doing it on a Saturday evening and you'll end up discovering you could have picked up an item cheaper while you were in town that afternoon.

The next downside is that it adds another seven seconds to the auction each time you bid. I understand why they do this - if you bid on an item I'm also bidding on, it gives me an extra seven seconds to counterbid. Seems fair - until ten people are trying to bid on the same auction in its dying seconds. Suddenly there's another one minute and ten seconds to wait until the auction ends and, before you know it, you've got bored, wandered away from the computer for a minute and some bugger else has won. Obviously, this method of always increasing the time means that eventually you could have auctions that last for all eternity but, if you look closely, telebid.com do actually add final times to their auctions. There's a Dyson DC16 Animal currently listed, price presently £67.13 with about twenty minutes to go but, in the bottom corner of the auction, telebid.com proudly tell you that the auction will end at the latest on March 8th 2008 at 9:52am. Plenty of time to get a cuppa and some Jaffa Cakes in, then.

Telebid.com do entice you with some special feature auctions as well as ordinary auctions: Fixed Price Auctions (where you only pay the price in the headline, regardless of what the bidding reaches); Penny Auctions (where the price increases by one penny instead of 7p); 100% off (which is exactly as it says, regardless of what the bidding reaches); and so on. There are a few arbitrary ones too. All you pay extra is the delivery charge - and, of course, your bidding fee of 50p.

Since January 1st I have spent a small fortune on bids in the vain hopes that I will be able to pick up a PS3 cheaply, yet I'm still waiting to win one. I have to admit that I daren't count up how much I've spent - the chances are I would have been able to buy the telly, the PS3, the laptop and a Dyson handheld vacuum cleaner to hoover up where bits of Jaffa Cake and sausage roll pastry have fallen in my crotch while staring intently at auctions, all for less than I've actually paid in bids. But at least I'd have something to play with.

The moral of my story is simple: stick to eBay or keep your local high street alive because, in short, since discovering Telebid.com I've realised it would have been quicker - not to mention cheaper - to have sold both bollocks in the first place, bought a PS3 and taken up stalking Jennifer Aniston via Facebook.