This is an excellent question given the substantial proliferation of bots in online auction sites and the answer is a resounding no.  Bidazzled does not, never has and never will use bots to place bids.   While we much rather talk about all the wonderful things we have planned for Bidazzled, this topic needs addressing.

That question was raised on www.pennyauctionwatch.com today (thank you to “bella”) for bringing it to our attention that Bidazzled may potentially use bots.

A “bot” is a program that places bids with the sole purpose of driving up the price of an auction.  Bots are so common. it is hard to know if a site is using them or not.  So how do we (or any site for that matter) convince people that a site does not use bots?  While we cannot speak for anyone else, here are our reasons:

1. Bidazzled has been in development for over ten months and the website for over six months.  If we were seeking a to create a site that simply placed bots to drive up the price, we could have had a site up almost 10 months ago, plowed the $40K development costs on top of our existing marketing budget and have dominated the market.   While penny auction bidders may not be aware of this fact, the truth is: a person could have a penny auction site up that is riddled with bots within a day, and could do it for under $100.   We strive to offer much more.
2. We strive to offer transparency, fairness and an ethical place that people can bid with comfort.  That was the driving force behind Bidazzled.   Bidazzled exists not to make people wealthy but to fund a charity (more on that to follow).
3. We originally purchased three auction sites only to find out they they were incomplete and full of bots.  After being taken advantage of and misled by numerous developers  to the tune of around eight thousand dollars, we had two versions of Bidazzled commissioned.  The first is going through it’s Live Beta Testing and the other is still 45 days away from completion.
4. If there is a comprehensive pre-made site in the marketplace that does not use bots, we missed it.   And we looked very very hard.   We conducted extensive searches and in the end made the decision to build a site from the ground up.  The absolute minimum development time (in our opinion) for a basic auction site should be at least 2 months and then another month or so for testing.  Our development time is pushing 7 months on the current site mostly because of it’s advanced features.  This simply means that we are serious about what we are doing and why we are doing it.  If it were about using bots to make money – we would not have invested this heavily in the infrastructure.
5. The reference made in the Penny Auction Watch regarding a sniper program is just that – an attempt to build a sniper program.   As an auction enthusiast, who wouldn’t want to have a sniper program that you could program to bid for you.   The intent was to build a sniper program (similar in many ways to the dozens of sniper programs that exist for ebay) that allow a bidder to place a bid at a desired time on a variety of auction sites.     These programs exist now and are available openly on the web.   On scriptlance, we were looking for a program that could be built to bid on multiple sites.   Unfortunately, the complexity of having more than one site was too great to operate efficiently and the developer refund the $1,000 escrow  payment on July 17.  We are happy to share proof of that transaction along with correspondence with the programmer to a neutral party.
6. Timing.  The request for the “sniper program” was made before development work began on Bidazzled.  If the purpose was to create a bot program, it would make little sense to build it before you build the auction site.  As stated earlier, purchasing a site with bots is very simple and inexpensive ; it is illogical to purchase a bot program before you have a site.
7. Traffic.  Bidazzled is very new, has done very little marketing and currently has more unique visitor traffic than most of the current penny auction sites.  This is a challenging claim to make as you have to be careful at the data involved.   We are only available in America and since we are in beta testing – we have an average of auctions 3-4 days a week and only for part of a day as we test systems.  Even with those few auctions, our unique visitors are high as – word spreads quickly and  last week our numbers were higher than many sites that have been around for quite some time.    So if traffic is high – relative to little to no advertising and only a few sporadic auction sessions – bots would be deflating these numbers.
8. Ethics.  In late 2008, I lost one of my closest and dearest friends to Lung Cancer.   Watched as  he bravely fought a disease that knows no defeat, and held him as he passed.   Jimmy Ruch’s one continued desire, was to create a Foundation to help people with Small Cell Lung Cancer.   His wish was to  stop the disease from doing to others – what it was doing to him.   So some of his friends and I put some money aside and started to build Bidazzled with the goal of creating a program that would fund his charity – The Jimmy Ruch Fund.  Note, this is a  501C3 charity (as in an actual IRS recognized charity – not some made up name in the veil of a charity).   We are well funded and those that invested own their our respective businesses.   Bidazzled is based on ethics, a good cause, fairness and has been developed for the long haul – not a “pass in the night” organization.
9. We are happy to let an impartial organization look through our site code at any time for any hint of a bot.
10. Soon, our first winners start to receive their winnings, we are encouraging and rewarding them to send in a photo and a testimonial of them with their prize.

Hopefully we can put that issue to rest that Bidazzled has not, does not and will never utilize bidding bots.  We are most happy to do whatever we can to put anyone’s concerns at ease on this matter.