New Dubli Website – The Demise of Zer0

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October 5th, 2009 by ugottadothis

: Image by Jeff Youngstrom via Flickr

A week or two ago, the Dubli website changed. The most notable change was the removal of the Zer0 auction.

I’ve not been attending the Webcasts as often as I should, so I don’t know what the official word on why the Zer0 auction was removed is. But I have a guess.

I’ve long believed that the Zer0 auction was vulnerable to webscripts that could automatically check the price and then, when the price was below a certain threshhold, could check the price automatically very quickly until the price was driven to 0. For a good programmer, this would be a piece of cake to do.

I might be wrong, of course. And Zer0 might be coming back for all I know.

And, the new site layout is great, I think.

3 Responses

Steven writes:

October 6th, 2009 at 6:39 am

At the end of the day I still think they will be forced to move towards the viewprice.com model. Although I dont think they can.

Paul Novak writes:

October 6th, 2009 at 8:34 pm

The demise of Zero was actually all about the numbers. The auction was too slow and it took forever for them to get to Zero. Secondly, it was the only Auction that was getting some heat from those out there who were barking up the wrong tree about DubLi being gambling… which it isn’t by a LONG shot. Now that Zero has been removed, the focus is strongly on the 2 reverse Auctions. Like yesterday, my wife bid on a $500 Visa Gift Card at Unique Auctions – she bid 5 times.. only to find out that the unique Auction winner was someone who bid at $1.50! Wow! What a savings eh? Have fun with it, and if there is anyway we can help you with some tools for promotion, just ask. Cheers, Paul – AttainResponse.tv

biddingtracker writes:

October 7th, 2009 at 11:27 am

I agree with Paul. Even though those that criticised Dubli for being a gambling site were very wrong, their argument really goes away now that Zer0 is gone. And it took forever for things to get down to where they were interesting.

But its also true that when Zer0 auctions would get down to close to Zer0, the bidding would get so intense that I often believed that it must be some computer (or many) that were bidding it down. I saw some giftcards ($200 to $500) go from $26 to $0.50 (yes, $0.50 twice) in a matter of seconds where before the bidding was pretty slow.

Anyway, if you want to see current prices on Xpress and a discussion of strategy for Unique Bid, come over to biddingtracker.com and participate…