pennyauction.com.my and pennyauction.com.sg

I beleive I come across pennyauction.com.sg site from facebook. Out of curiorsity I check out the site. And also doing some research on related sites as well. I found pennyauction.com.my
So one from Singapore and the other from Malaysia (based on the domain name).

But the interesting thing is, the same products and bidders appear on the 2 sites. I am just wondering, does this mean that we are bidding against 2 countries. Maybe more, who know :P

I further search around and discover that this type of sites are quite popular now (or maybe much earlier).
They are call penny auction. Basically as a bidder, you need to spend some money (say $1) to bid. For every bid, the bid price will increase by a penny (or cent or whatever you wanna call it). Bidders will continue until no one is bidding. And the winner will then have to pay for the bid price + shipping fee.

Frankly, the whole model look great to me, not as a bidder but a site owner :P

Say you list up a popular product that retail price is at $2
(so assume that, typically people will stop biding at around $1)

Bid# - Bid $ Spend - Bid at $
------------------
1 - $1 - $0.01
2 - $2 - $0.02
3 - $2 - $0.03
10 - $10 - $0.10
....
100 - $100 - $1.00

Do you see the trend? For a $2 dollar product, and if the winning bid is $1, the site owner will profit about $100 - $2 + $1 = $99.
That's is a lot of profit margin for 1 sale, earn $99 from a $2 product !!!
Even if the winning bid is at $0.10, the profit is already $10 - $2 + $1 = $9.00
Now imagine that this is a $1000 product.

Of course, you might be saying, still have supporting cost to run the business. Or course it will, which busines does not? But will they get should a high profit margin?

Personally, base of the research that I have found and digested, you might get "lucky" when not many people are bidding. Which will be quite unlikely if the site is popular. Beside, I wonder if the whole process is monitored. It is quite easy to trick in these type of sytem/software. By the way, I am not saying that all these sites are tricking. What I am trying to say it that, from technically stand point, if the whole process is not transparent, who know if the winner bidder is "real"?

Personally, I will not bid on these type of sites. But is up to you. Who know, you might be lucky :P
If I have a choice, I would rather start up a site for you to bid :) Supporter need :P

You can learn more about penny auction at:
http://www.pennyauctionwatch.com/