bidorbuy (Pty) Ltd.
Tel: 011 367 0000 | Fax: 011 706 6523
Ground Floor, Building 2, Silverpoint Office
Park, 22 Ealing Crescent, Bryanston, 2191
Africa’s Largest Online Marketplace
www.bidorbuy.co.za
Profile
bidorbuy is South Africa’s largest online marketplace, providing buyers and sellers with an online
platform to trade with one another. Everything and anything can be bought and sold on bidorbuy.
In July 2011, the number of registered users stood at about 700,000, and the number of items
listed for sale at almost 650,000.
The Challenge
There are both buy-now and auction listings on bidorbuy. For buy-now listings, shoppers are able
to buy straight away at a fixed price. With auction listings, buyers are able to put in a bid and
sometimes can snap up a great bargain. Many shoppers prefer this format as they relish the
excitement of bidding and winning. However the challenge comes in for would-be buyers of the
auction format as auctions can be time-consuming. They have to wait for the auction to run its
course, which may be a matter of hours or of days, before they find out if they have won the item,
In the meantime, they may need to place numerous new bids to outbid the competition.
bidorbuy automatically informs bidders if they are outbid on an auction via email. However, this
method often requires the bidder to be at his or her computer, which is not always the case.
The Solution
The bidorbuy SMS Alerts service enables bidders on online auctions to receive text notifications
on their cell phone when they are outbid. This means that the bidder no longer needs to be at a
computer to find out whether he or she is winning the item or not. The bidder can subscribe to the
SMS Alerts service and stay updated wherever he or she happens to be.
This service also allows bidders to increase their current bid by replying to the alert or by sending
an SMS to a dedicated number.
It is free to receive outbid alerts from bidorbuy via SMS. The subscribers to the service will only
be charged the standard fee by the network operator if they reply to the outbid alert or if they
send a new bid to the dedicated number.
When they subscribe to the SMS Alerts service, the subscribers only receive the “you’ve been
outbid” for the auction in question. No other kind of communication is sent to their cell phones by
bidorbuy.
The Results
Registered users that have opted for SMS outbid alerts : 26,030
Number of bids sent via SMS: 1,531
Number of outbid alerts sent: 67,024
Number of SMSs with Errors i.e Invalid Destination Address and No Credit Left: 4,042
Number of outbid Alert Registration confirmations sent: 34,455
Bids placed last year via SMS: 675
Bids placed from the first of the year 2011 via SMS: 856
Outbid alerts sent in 2010: 28,805
Outbid alerts sent from January to mid-August this year: 38,152