January 05, 2010
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
InfoSpace Inc., a leading developer of search engine products, has now brought Haggle.com, their competitive shopping site experience live out of beta mode. The site allows users to bid on brand name electronics, home appliances, gift cards, and a variety of other products. Haggle.com is an auction format somewhat similar to Ebay, but the bidding process has one very unique twist: pay to play, no matter what. For example a $1,199 MacBook Pro laptop currently has a bid of $87.80 with less than five minutes to go. As with other auction sites someone can come in at the last minute and outbid the current bid for a chance to win the item. What makes Haggle.com different is that you have to pay for your bid no matter what, regardless if you win the auction and the item. Therefore in some cases sellers may make more money in an auction, than the item is actually worth. Luckily you can buy bids in bulk on the site and, to test things out, your first bid is free.
Over the past couple years, InfoSpace has continued to try and diversify their business by adding different niche web sites to their portfolio. Now that the site is out of beta mode, it is becoming increasingly popular among deal hunters and auction site enthusiasts. One thing to keep in mind is that the bidding can get very competitive so it is best to watch the site a bit as it updates in real time. Then you get a better sense of how the auction process flows at Haggle.com from start to finish, so you can be more comfortable when you start bidding.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
