Aussie Reverse Auctions

Most people look at DubLi and think it’s an auction site, in business to sell auction items to customers. This is not really the case. DubLi’s auctions are a strategic “means to an end”, and only a small part of the revenue model.

DubLi is an early stage shopping portal that aggregates shoppers on its website, and then sells those shoppers to major search engines and online merchants for click-through fees and revenue-share fees. Aggregating and selling online shoppers is an established, multi-billion-dollar industry, led by companies like Google, Amazon, and eBay.

DubLi is already a player in this industry with its largest customer for ecommerce services being Kelkoo, which is the Yahoo!-owned search engine in Europe. DubLi charges Kelkoo whenever DubLi shoppers click through to Kelkoo or purchase products from Kelkoo affiliated merchants.

The DubLi customer also gets “entertainment” value in watching the price drop, which is critical to the viral growth of the customer base. In exchange for the 80¢ fee, the customer gets access to discounted prices at dubli.com, in the same way that a Costco member gets access to discounted prices at Costco stores in exchange for the membership fee, in the form of a DubLi “credit” that costs 80¢.

This auction fee covers DubLi’s cost of acquiring the customer and running the auctions and games, and it also covers the cost of reducing the auction price of the product by 25¢ with each bid, which makes the auctions exciting and drives traffic. with each bid In an eBay auction, the seller is charged the auction fee.

In a DubLi auction, the bidder is charged the fee. DubLi uses reverse auctions and games to drive traffic to dubli.com. Google’s hook is search; Amazon’s has always been books; eBay’s is auctions. DubLi’s hook is reverse auctions and shopping games (entertainment shopping). The most successful shopping portals have “hooks” to draw traffic to their site.

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