Thursday, August 30, 2007

Interesting Free Reverse Auction Game where you can win prizes

Found this interesting site Sweepstake which offers a free reverse auction game that gives you an opportunity to win attractive prizes. All you need to do is to sign up for an account. I found it so interesting that I wanted to test it out myself, so I tried to register for an account. I found that they offer 2 types of membership - Standard Member an Premium Member:

free or paid sweepstake member

If you want to play for free for an opportunity to win those attractive prizes, you will have to settle for a Standard Membership and put up with the advertisements. If you are a more serious player and don't want advertisements, just pay $9.99 per month and get extra benefits.

Standard Members can only submit 20 advertiser supported online bids per day but cannot bid via mobile. However, they can play arcade games to redeem points for prizes.

Premium Members get a total of 20 mobile or online bids per day without advertisements. They can also play arcade games to redeem points for prizes.

I tried registering for a Standard Membership but was disappointed to find out that I have to input a mobile phone number plus select from a list of mobile phone service providers from a drop-down menu which are all Americans. So looks like even though the site never mentioned it is only for residents of the United States, in practice, non-US residents are not eligible to play.

Anyhow, it looks very easy to play the bidding game. All you have to do is to sign up as a member, go to Free gifts where you will see a series of open bids, one of which will have only hours to go and that will be the daily grand prize. The one I saw when I went there really looks interesting. It was a DVD Home Theater System which I am sure is an expensive piece of equipment:

DVD Home Theater System

If you go to Cash prize and click "Next", you will see other bids but with longer time remaining, and on the day I went there, I saw

bid for cash prize

which was for bidding for a Cash Prize of $500 but with a longer time remaining (12+ days). As the bids with shorter time remaining expire, this will eventually become the next daily grand prize. This may be more interesting to you if you are not looking to aquiring more material stuff, but want cash (note: this is decribing what I observed on the day I went there. What you see may be different as the daily grand prize will expire and be replaced by the next one, and so on, so this is not a static site).

To play, you bid enter your cell number and bid for the prize. The lowest unique bid for every prize starts out at one cent - if more than one person bids a penny, then that penny is no longer the lowest unique bid and 2 cents is the new low unique bid. If more than one person bids 2 cents then 3 cents is the next lowest unique bid. And so on and so on. The winning bid could be anything, it could be a cent, a dollar even 500 dollars! Whatever is the lowest UNIQUE bid wins the prize!

But as mentioned earlier, winning the bid for the daily grand prize is not the only way you can win prizes from this interesting site. You can also play arcade games to redeem points and when you have enough points, you can redeem them for prizes at Free gifts.