I recently dis­abled com­ments on an old post called “Bid­Fire: Decep­tively Easy To Get Burned” because all of the com­ments were sense­less pos­i­tive reviews for Bid­Fire and didn’t con­tribute to the dis­cus­sion about the ser­vice in my opin­ion. To put it in per­spec­tive, the 70 com­ments on that one arti­cle accounts for close to 25% of all the com­ments on this blog. I had a sus­pi­cion that these com­menters were being instructed by Bid­Fire to leave pos­i­tive reviews because most of the com­menters put some man­gled form of “Bid­Fire” as their web­site. Today, I have proof!

Here is an email for­warded to me by a Bid­Fire winner:

We need your help!

Bid­Fire winners,

If you are receiv­ing this it is because you are the win­ner of at least one bid­fire auc­tion. Wel­come to the winner’s club, congratulations!

Remem­ber you always get free bids by send­ing a photo or video to winners@bidfire.com – a photo of you with your prod­uct gets 10 free bids, and a video gets 25.

We are start­ing to see neg­a­tive reviews and com­ments sur­fac­ing on some web­sites accus­ing us of being a scam with­out real win­ners. As we all know, win­ning an auc­tion doesn’t hap­pen every time and requires skill and ded­i­ca­tion. Each of you has won some­thing and can attest to hav­ing real prod­uct deliv­ered in a timely fash­ion, some­thing we pride our­selves on.

It’s uncer­tain whether the com­ments are com­ing from com­peti­tors or just dis­grun­tled peo­ple who haven’t won any­thing, prob­a­bly a com­bi­na­tion of both. Instead of defend­ing our­selves a a legit­i­mate oper­a­tion that has a huge base of happy win­ners, we would pre­fer if you would help do it for us.

We need your help — we are ask­ing you to post your expe­ri­ences with bid­fire to fend off these false accusations.

As a reward for your time, and because every­body loves free bids, we will give you 5 free bids for a thought­ful comment/review on one of the sites, and 15 free bids if you post a review on every site. Just email your bid­fire user­name and the link to your review(s) to reviews@bidfire.com and we will credit your account.

Here are the sites that could use your help set­ting the record straight:

www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.bidfire.com

www.maxbeatty.com/blog/2009/09/bidfire-easy-to-get-burned

www.pennyauctionwatch.com/forum/showthread.php?t=138&highlight=bidfire

www.paulthology.com/blog/?p=423

www.reviews.wikia.com/Bidfire.com

We appre­ci­ate your sup­port as a com­mu­nity, and we espe­cially appre­ci­ate your assis­tance in help­ing set the record straight.

Team Bid­fire

I think this is a ter­ri­ble way for them to try to improve their image. It’s cheap, spammy, and some­what uneth­i­cal. It also sounds like Bid­Fire employ­ees are too lazy to do their own work.

As I men­tioned in my clos­ing com­ment, some­one from Bid­Fire approached me ear­lier this month to dis­cuss chang­ing the title of my blog post. I tried to tell her that I thought my arti­cle was fair and that chang­ing the title wouldn’t really change any­thing. She just kept ask­ing me to change it and wanted me to write another pos­i­tive arti­cle for them. I stopped using the site months ago and don’t feel like help­ing them out espe­cially now that they’ve been send­ing peo­ple to spam my blog.

What I Would Have Liked To See

Instead of flood­ing all of these blogs with use­less com­ments, how about some­one from Bid­Fire start a con­ver­sa­tion to clear up some of the ques­tions peo­ple have about their ser­vice? The site looks like a scam because there are just a few vague email addresses to con­tact them. Cre­ate a form, put your pic­ture on there, tell us who else is work­ing there. Tell me and every­one else why your ser­vice is great and not a scam instead of hav­ing a bunch of ran­dom peo­ple just say, “I won some­thing on Bid­Fire. It is not a scam.” That’s worth­less to me.

Becom­ing more trans­par­ent will help build trust in your ser­vice. Send­ing emails like this will not.