Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Bidazzled. All opinions are 100% mine.

I was one of the early adopters of eBay. I used it extensively when it was still young, and prices were competitive. I recall winning a large sapphire for $70, a price which Canadian customs found so hard to accept that they had to call in an appraisor to try to tax me according to the value they thought it was (thankfully, I had all the documentation).

Alas - the glitter and glamour soon faded. Terrible site layout, hideous account management, overpriced items, and my person bane - ninja bidders, all drove me away. I've tried many other auction sites - Bid-or-buy, Aucor, StormPay Auctions, but none really got me excited.

Until now. Enter the world of Bidazzled.

While reading about this auction service, I became keenly interested, but kept a healthy skepticism. I was particularly drawn to the point that bidding on an item extended the time for that action by a few seconds. This seems a lot more in line with real-world auctions, where bidding continues so long as there are people bidding. Having a concrete cut-off like eBay was an annoyance, and opened the gates to the ninja bidder, who would time their bids to push their bid in at the last possible second. None of that rubbish here.

Conceptually, there is one area which I found interesting - the idea of available bid points. The incrementation of the bids on the items is submit to the amount of bid points you have. The value by which the item increases is automatic. This actually turns out to be a lot friendlier than the "hit or miss highest reasonable bid" that you are subject to on other such sites. I feel more in control.

However, here's where things get interesting - you get more bids available to you by bringing in friends. I know, I know, people always think of this as a "pyramid", but you're not putting in any money, so there's zero risk to you. You simply get more chances to buy things at insanely low prices. Right now, I have a bid in on a PS3 for $1.60 - that's right, under $2 for the latest piece of gaming hardware out there.

The excitement of the auction is back in my veins, that's for darn sure!

And if this wasn't enough, there's even a humanitarian consideration here. A portion of the profits that Bidazzled makes goes to a lung cancer charity, The Ruch Foundation.

Honestly, the only critique I have so far is a very minor technical one - if you go to the site using the URL "http://bidazzled.com" (dropping the "www." prefix), then entering into the SSL context causes a certificate warning. At first, this caught me off guard, but it's really nothing to be concerning with - the error message given to me by FireFox clearly showed the issue - that the certificate is valid for "www.bidazzle.com", and I could see quite quickly that I had left off the "www." prefix.

With a super-clean interface, I have no complaints here. Major kudos to the designers, and here's hoping them all the success.