BidFire Rewarding Winners For Spamming Blogs
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.
March 10th, 2010 at 4:50 am
Hi.I like reading your post , keep doing it.
March 20th, 2010 at 10:06 am
A well written blog post. I’m an online gamer and I’m always looking for information like this.
March 23rd, 2010 at 5:23 am
Funny, I think the letter is Brilliant!
I mean come on, it’s totally not scammy, it’s completely honest and straight forward. It’s kind of like calling your friends to rally for you. No one forced their customers to write reviews or share their stories. AND it’s REAL customers not paid to comment people.
I mean really, by the looks of just about anyone’s inbox we all get some loyalty coupons / discounts from about every major retailer on the planet. I’ve re-tweeted brands that I like in order to get a coupon I see no difference in offering a bid as compensation.
I own my own company if someone was writing negative stuff about me that I did not think was accurate I would do my very best to reach out to them as well. I also author on a ‘green’ blog where most of my post out right attack companies, I fact check like crazy so when the disgruntled comments come in I know I’m write and I’m up for the fight.
The irony of it is I was looking up ‘bidfire scam’ on google and after reading your post I feel completely confident in them. I love smart business and I love that letter!!
June 25th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
The system has changed a little since your original post. Now bids increase the price by 1 cent and reset the clock to 30 seconds. What got me is people are playing the game differently now. It really is about internet connection speed. There are players who will sit and watch a couple of people use up all their bids (the people who reset the clock early on) and then those with fast connection speeds will begin the real bidding war at the 1 second line. I didn’t realize this would happen and got completely burned. And since bids only increase by 1 cent now, even products like macbook pros rarely make it above $15.