Mini Review:Redbread Auctions

Redbread offers you the chance to bid for and win brand name items such as Nintendo wii systems, gift cards for high street and online retailers and other electronic equipment at a low cost. Normally auctions finish at just a few pounds per auction so if your lucky enough to win you’ll make some great savings.

Each auction features a countdown clock. If this is allowed to reach zero, the auction is finished and the last person who placed a bid is the winner. However, every time a bid is placed the countdown clock is reset – either by 30 seconds or a few minutes depending on the auction. If an item is in demand I imagine that some auctions will go on for hours, with the countdown clock being reset constantly.

Countdown auctions at Redbread

The great thing about Redbread is you get ten free bids just for registering. Unfortunately it’s not clear what to do with them as Redbread offers several different auction types – but I struggled to easily find a clear explanation of each auction type. Of course bidding is easy enough, just hit the bid button and your away but it would help new users a lot if they could find a clear reference to each auction type as soon as they registered. Eventually I did find a brief explanation of the auction types within the help system. These are:

Penny: In a penny auction, each bid pushes the auction up by a penny. For example, if 184 members bid for the item the cost would by £1.84

Regular: In a regular auction, the bids are pushed up by seven pence per bid. If three users bid the item would go for 21 pence.

Fixed Price Auctions: Some items come with a fixed price so it doesn’t matter what the bid amount is pushed up to, the item will always sell at a fixed price. Again, the last person to bid when the countdown is allowed to reach zero is the winner.

Nailbitter: During a nail bitter auction, sellers are not allowed to use BidBuilder – the Redbread snipping system.

100% Discounted Auctions: These seem to be the best to me. If your lucky enough to win a 100% discounted auction, all you pay for is the postage and your bids. You do not have to pay the price the auction finished at.

Bids cost just fifty pence each (this is how the site makes any money) and are available in different packages up to the 500 bids package for £250. Personally I’d hope for the price of bids to drop below fifty pence if I spent more than £100 but instead Redbread rewards it’s members by including free bonus bids on the larger bid packages.

I love the concept and styling of Redbread, and am certainly going to have some fun this weekend using my ten free bids. Here at AuctionCut we’d love to know your experiences with the site. Your comments are welcome. Visit Redbread by clicking here.