legit

BigDeal.com, in my opinion, offers the very best features among a sea of penny auctions and current auction script software available. Their unique bidder stats show in real-time how many bids a user has placed, how long a user has been in the auction, when the last bid was, and also a history of winners of previous auctions and how much they spent.

I just came across Penny-AuctionsOnline.com - aka  ParPoo.com (the domain that P-AO forwards to) –  ”Penny Auctions Online,” and there are a few things that I find quite odd.

1. ParPoo looks just like BigDeal – from the layout, background color, bid buttons, bid pack item images, formatting, buy it now, How it Work’s page, even down to BigDeal’s grey advanced auction statistics panel.
2. ParPoo displays an Accredited by the Better Business Bureau (BBB) seal, but is ParPoo.com/Penny-AuctionsOnline.com really accredited? We don’t think so.
3. They display 15 pages of ended auctions. The winner’s first & last names are displayed.

This is Bigdeal.com’s homepage:This is ParPoo.com’s homepage:

Here’s an item on BigDeal:

Item on ParPoo:

BigDeal’s How it Works Page:

ParPoo’s How it Works Page:

We will be informing the BBB.

 When you hover over the seal it says the penny auction site has been accredited since today’s date, 8/5/11. Perhaps this date changes by day?

ParPoo displays “Click to verify BBB accreditation and to see a BBB report,” upon hovering over the seal, but there is no report.

BigDeal is BBB Accredited, here’s proof:

ParPoo isn’t the first penny auction to display a seal without being accredited, we’ve found a few that have. Recently we found that penny auction GrabSwag.com was displaying a BBB accredited seal and found out that they were not really accredited. We told the BBB and they recently issued a press release regarding the penny auction site’s unauthorized use of the seal.

This penny auction site is hosted in the US, but it may be from, or marketing to China.  Their current Alexa ranking is 1,579,183. According to Alexa, “We estimate that 65% of visitors to the site come from China, where it has attained a traffic rank of 101,420, and it is relatively popular among users in the city of Putian (where it is ranked #6,277).”

The domain of this new penny auction site, ParPoo.com was registered by “sszg zhang” on as recent a date as June 24, 2011. Penny-AuctionsOnline.com was registered back in February by “Ifwindy.”

Have you bid on ParPoo/Penny-AuctionsOnline.com? Tell us what your experiences have been with this penny auction site. Join our forum.

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