Can you really get $50 Gift Cards to Sephora, Walmart and Amazon for $2? That’s the claim that penny auction site Deal Dash makes. One morning, while doing internet stuff before coffee (never a good idea), I clicked through a friend’s link on facebook and followed the Yellow Brick Road to Deal Dash. Minutes later, I’d dropped $36 on my “first bid pack.” Since Deal Dash offers a money back guarantee, I figured there was no risk involved. I didn’t count on the site being so addictive.

What I discovered:

• Deal Dash does actually refund your first bid pack if you don’t win anything, so one could argue it is risk-free if you only buy one bid pack. Only your first bid pack is fully refundable. After that, buyer beware.
• For most of us, time is money. You can fritter away quite a bit of it before your first bid pack runs out. I spent way more time on Deal Dash than I anticipated. For some reason, it’s addictive to watch that auction clock run down, to look for new auctions, to check the winners’ list to see how much items have gone for. Before you know it, it’s time for dinner, and you’re wondering where the time went.
• It’s easy to win low-priced items, very difficult to win high-end items like fancy cameras, Breville coffee makers, and anything by Apple.
• If you get greedy or obsessive, you’re going to lose money. This is what happened to me with my second bid pack. For some reason, I got it in my head that I had a chance at taking home the $1500 camera, so I entered all of my bids, 250 to be precise, in Bid Buddy for the camera. The bids ran out, and some other guy who got into the auction in the final hour won the camera for $249. I considered myself relatively lucky, as I’d spent 250 bids, but I’d watched other bidders spend well over a thousand. This was a good lesson learned for me: don’t try to win items that retail for over $500. The auction is too unpredictable, and your chances of winning are so low that you’re likely to use up all your bids without winning anything.
• Everything ships free, so there are no weird hidden shipping and handling charges. But there is the hidden cost of lost time and that weird, jittery feeling you get from gambling.

How to use Dealdash without losing money

• When you join, just buy one bid pack (this way, you’re guaranteed your money back if you don’t win.)
• Begin by choosing two or three items you’d like to bid on.
• Place one bid on each item early in the auction, before the price hits $5.00. Why? Because DealDash has a good “no jumpers” rule, which means someone isn’t allowed to jump into an auction after the price has hit $5. At that point, the auction is closed to new bidders, which narrows the playing field a bit.
• Lower your expectations. Don’t expect to get an iPad for $3.50! These are the wins that DealDash advertises to entice you, but really hot items rarely go for pennies. So when bidding on a high-priced item, let the auction run for a while after placing your first bid. If the auction happens to end early and someone walks away with a 27-cent Keurig, no worries, you’ve only spent one bid.
• For high-priced items: after the auction has hit $5, start watching. Once the bidding war is down to two people, jump in. I’ve watched a lot of auctions, and this is how most are won. Two people are left in the game, both are using Bid Buddy, and one person’s bids run out. The one whose bids don’t run out wins. So if you see two people battling over something, and the item has reached a higher price point (look at the box on the left hand screen that tells you how much that item has gone for over the last few days), it’s a good time to enter your Bid Buddy bids.
• For low-priced or less desirable items: Sorry, but these are the ones you’re more likely to win. Now, aside from the iPad case, not one of those items is something I would have actively searched for if I hadn’t seen them on Deal Dash. But I actually liked the egg cooker, because I love poached eggs, and I’m never able to get them right, and I used it a lot. Happy accident. The pink Suisse Army knife was a great little stocking stuffer, and the baseball went under the tree for my son.

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How to win on Dealdash

• How I won on Deal Dash: in each case, I bid right when the auction started. The baseball and army knife auctions must not have been appealing enough for people to enter with Bid Buddies right at the start, so I was able to win both with just a couple of bids. When I bid on the iPad case, I’d decided that I wanted to just get out of Deal Dash before I wasted any money. I had 60 remaining bids, and I set them all to go with the start of the auction. I imagine that when people started bidding on the iPad case and saw that someone was so determined to get it, they probably decided to wait and get into the auction later. Considering that I used almost 50 bids on the case, it wouldn’t have been too much more expensive to buy it from a store, but at this point I did what I’d set out to do: recovered my initial investment and cashed out.
• How I won items for one cent: every item I won for a penny was marked “Beginners only.” If an item has a little blue sidebar that says “beginners only,” it’s very easy to win. That’s because the only people who are allowed to bid on it are newbies who haven’t won more than 3 items. It’s also because these are very un-glamorous items. A meat thermometer? It just so happened that my husband broke his mom’s meat thermometer by keeping it in the oven with the turkey on Thanksgiving, so we owed her one. The one I got for a penny is actually better than the one we broke, and since we would have had to buy one anyway, I consider this a score.
• If you’re looking to recoup the money you spent on your bid pack, try bidding on low-denomination gift cards. Skip the $200 Target card, which usually goes for over $50 (if you spend a ton of bids trying to win a $200 gift card, you’re not really doing yourself any favors). Go for small-denomination gift cards to stores you actually use: the $10 Amazon card, the $15 WalMart Card. Why? If you win the card, then that’s like getting cash back on the money you paid for your bids. And if you don’t win it, you can buy it at face value, and all of the bids you spent on it will be credited back to you. That’s why I consider low-denomination gift cards to be risk-free auction items.
• When bidding on gift cards, don’t bid on the gift card + bids auctions. These tend to go for more, and also, you won’t come out even if you end up purchasing the gift card. Let’s say it’s a $15 gift card plus 25 bids. If you don’t win the auction, but you want the gift card, you’ll pay the face value of the card plus the highest value of the 25 bids.

Deal Dash Tips & Tricks for newbies:

How to get a refund of your bid pack: Once you’re in, if you decide you like the site, you can usually get big discounts on bid packs. If you spend your first 60 bids and realize it’s a big time suck and you want to run far and fast, just email Deal Dash and tell them you want to claim your money-back guarantee. At this point, they’ll refund the money you spent on your first bid pack, and you can keep anything you’ve won. They’ll also probably give you a few dozen bids to lure you back in. If you’re smart, you’ll use those bids to get a couple of cheap, useful items, and then move on to other things.