It is a new site that buds is sponsoring or running? It looks like they are trying to pass on all of the costs to the buyer. Unless they end up having awesome deals I don't see this working out. They want u to pay .55c to place a bid for each 1c u bid. And then u pay for the auction if u win (from their FAQ page).

I'm thinking it will be a pass for me.

These kind of auctions could SOMETIMES be beneficial to both the seller and buyer. (it depends on the final price and number of bidders)
Suppose a widget sells for $100 normally. Now suppose your winning bid was $90. If you and 2 other guys had bid 10 times each, you bought the widget for $95.50 and the seller gets $106.50. The losing bidders have paid for your discount and the sellers extra profit. Of course you can bid too high and screw yourself, but you can do that at any auction.

That being said, I've never participated in one of these, so anyone with actual experience should let me know if I've got this wrong.

What I was reading stated that they charge .55c per bid, and most bids are a 1c. Therefor you are paying 55c for every penny u bid. Therefor for $100 bid, if half the bids were yours you already paid $275, plus the $100 u bid.

The concept seems week to me, GB and eBay have it right IMO, the seller should pay, why should I pay to bid on something that I might not even win. And the costs to bid here just seem outrageous!!

Rant Over.

I've seen similar auctions advertised on tv and they all kind of smell like a scam to me.

They arent a scam, but you need a double digit iq to think they are a good idea. On the sites side, its a massive money maker.

They pray on the people who say "its only a dollar and maybe ill get lucky!" Crowd. And there goes $100 or whatever "bid pack" money they had to buy intp just to get started.

Im willing to offer a bargain. Send me just 50% of what youwere planning to spend on the bids and i 100% guarantee, thats right I GUARANTEE that ill send you nothing in return!

Pm me and ill give you my pp address!

I buy and sell on gunbroker.com. They a fair and simple to use.

I joined Bud's VIP but it is not worth the $20.

I have bought a large portion of my collection via GB too. I agree, fair and simple.

I guess this is legal but it is the closet thing to a scam around. In a normal auction the high bidder pays for the gun. In these every bidder pays, your money is gone whether you win the auction or not. You are paying to bid.

It's almost like the original online low dollar bidding site, BeeZid...You buy so many bids and then bid in penny increments....

I watched a couple of items on BeeZid and the bidding went on for hours between a half dozen people...The observed price was really low, but to have bid for that long, the cost of the bids had to have been up there..

Legal, yes....Ethical, not so sure...Cost effective, rarely..

Oldturtle is right. You basically have to wait until the bid is almost over before you start bidding. The bids can last up to 5 to 7 days. You have to wait until the time is almost ran out before you bid. You purchase your bids in a package deal before you start bidding. You can set it up to auto bid for you. You tell it how much your willing to spend and how many bids your willing to use. It seems time consuming and your probably not going to get as good as a deal as they make it seem but there still is a chance of some good deals

It is risky to be playing on those types of "auction" sites.
Frequently they will have a "shill" bidder who is out lurking in the crowd who may actually even be a computer. The shill bidder's job is to keep the bidding going. You are having to spend money with each bid trying to get the item. If you give up and stop bidding then you already lost money by placing bids that were a good deal initially but you come up with nothing. If the shill bidder "wins" the auction because the item price did not ever get high enough then the item is actually not sold and will later get relisted however all of the profits for the previous bids will be retained by the website or the seller...
There was a big expose on a few of these types of websites I think GunGear or something like that and a lot of people were upset that they had been ripped off.