It’s quite possible that you may have never heard of Smokoo – don’t feel bad. I hadn’t heard of them either until a couple of weeks ago. With tons of secrecy surrounding their launch, nobody really knew what they were all about.
Well, the secret is out. Smokoo.co.za is an auction site. Yes, I see the look of boredom in your eyes. I was underwhelmed initially. Then I started looking at and using the site.
Beautiful isn’t even in it. Don’t go into this thinking that Smokoo is like BidOrBuy or eBay. Despite the similar themes, Smokoo is something the other auction sites isn’t – completely live. And it’s that live addiction that they’re hooking into and people are buying into the system and buying big.
Putting aside the aesthetics of the site, watching auctions countdown when you’ve bid on one is highly addictive, intensely enthralling and even a little fun.
The way it works is this:
- You buy “bid credits” at the price (currently) of R5 per bid.
- Each auction that comes up has a price per bid – a number of credits per increment of R0.01 in price. So far the price has been at 1 credit per bid but it looks like it can go up (or down) should the powers that be decide.
- You pick an auction that you’d like to bid on from the list. A TomTom GPS, a Mercedes CLK, brand new iPhone – it’s up to you.
- You click “place bid” and along with everyone else, you watch and wait to see if your bid was the last one. If it was, congratulations you just won your auction. Whatever the price you bid was is what you’ve just bought the item at (excl. shipping)
- If you were not the last bidder the timer will jump up by 10 seconds and you’ll have another chance to become top of the heap.
So far, some of the items which have been sold are:
PS3 slim+GodOfWar 3 for R3.73
iPad 16GB for R10.33
There are a bunch more but you should probably go out there and take a look for yourself.
If you’d like an invite directly to the site, please leave a comment here.
Happy bidding!