Bid/Auction sites

I tend to buy my firearms through local dealers and ammo, in bulk, I buy online. I generally don't do the reverse because I usually don't find it cost efficient. It's not a knock, per say, on either side of the transaction, because I have no qualms about somebody making a buck (If someone's a shiester and I buy blindly from them, I'm the asshole because I should have known better - case in point to follow), but I find that I can buy ammo cheaper online (especially now) and guns cheaper at my local shops.
I do peruse some online dealers and on one, I saw the site BidGunner. It's a "penny bid" auction site. If you've never been to one of these, here's the idea:
Someone provides a product. Let's say it's an H&K P30 9mm. The bidding starts at $.01. You buy a pack of bids. These packs are roughly $1/bid. That's important to remember! So you bid, I bid, Charlie bids, Frank bids, Sue bids, etc... The winning price climbs by $.01 for every bid. So, you get into a bidding war and after some hours/days, someone wins the product for X amount.  
Here's where it gets slippery and why, after buying 50 bids and going through a couple auctions, I walked away from that place shaking my head going, "Never fucking again, I'm such a dumbass."
Let's say that P30 9mm has a retail price of $850. On the auction site, let's say the final winning bid was $25. This means, you pay BidGunner (or it's provider of firearms, Buds Gun Shop) $25, minus the bids you put in, and the gun is yours. Sweet deal!!! Ah, ah, ah... here's the trick. The site got $2,500 for that gun. Remember, every bid is roughly $1 to purchase and in the auction, each bid is worth $.01. So, to make $25, 2,500 bid were put in.

YES, it only costs you the total amount of bids and if you were able to play it right, you only paid say $20. Hell, maybe you only paid $100, for an $850 gun. But you need to look at the larger picture and realize that your actions just gave that company a fuckwad of money over and above what they could get at retail AND, you also paid them for the bids in all the auctions you didn't win.

Standard auction sites, like GunBroker or eBay for example, work in standard dollar bids. If you bid $50 and you win, you pay $50. Penny bid sites, and this applies to general sites like Quibids and Beezid as well, work on psychology and because your bid is only $.01, you mind comes to the conclusion that that's all you're paying. So at the end of bidding, if you won with the final bid being $50, you think that's all the selling is getting for it. No, they just got $5,000 for something (minus fees).

Let me make this clear: These sites are doing nothing illegal or if you will, underhanded. They lay out exactly what they're doing in their explanations. But, they DO play off the human psyche and let you forget that they're making out like bandits. Like all auction sites, anyone selling something without a "reserve" is gambling. But they're playing the odds that enough people will want this item so they'll fight over it.

Knowledge is power. Before you go into anything having to do with money, think very carefully about what you're getting into.