Firstly, we would like to thank our loyalists as well as critics equally whose valuable feedback continues to define and shape CountSpin. One nagging problem that many of you were unhappy about — you had to make sure you were around to participate in a deal when it went live. Sure, we offered the alert feature in the last release which took some of the pain away since you could be notified just when your desired deal was about to come online. But then what if you were busy at that time (you have a life, after all!)? Point taken.

With this latest release, you now have the ability to place a bid in advance on the deal (or deals) that you are interested in! Basically, you can just enter the price you are willing to pay on a deal that is in queue. As and when the deal goes live and the price starts falling, the system will act on your behalf to track if the price drops to your bid amount. If it does, your purchase is automatically made and you will be mailed an invoice. If not, you will be notified that the bid didn’t work out.

We have kept the process as simple as possible. To place a bid, you need to just click on the deal you are interested in and then reach for the ‘Place Bid’ button. The guidelines then are as follows -

• You can cancel your bid any time before the deal goes live.
• If the deal does not go live for some reason (usually when the show has run out of time), your bid will automatically be cancelled.
• Once the deal is live, you cannot withdraw or change your bid.
• After the deal has played out, you will be notified whether or not your bid won.

So go ahead — take her out for a spin!

Some of you have inquired about the monthly membership subscription that exempts shipping & handling charges. This membership was designed for those who make very frequent purchases, typically because they are resellers. 

Nonetheless, this Sunday, we have a special offer — no shipping & handling charges on any of the deals all day long for all counters! That’s right, the All In episodes airing on Sunday will feature assortments across brands, but the Final Price you snap is all you will pay. If the show does well, we will retain it in our programming schedule. So let us know if you support the initiative… either by making a purchase or by sending us feedback or by doing both.

Almost everyone is familiar with the auction process. To most people, it seems intuitive and logical. But then you could make the same argument about stock trading. ‘Buy low and sell high’ is a line of argument that should appeal to the meanest intelligence, one would think. However, what makes human beings so interesting and their lives so much more exciting is that, despite their wonderful powers of intuition and rationalization, they have a remarkable propensity to act on emotion, often in contradiction to logic and rationality. It is a phenomenon that continues to confound well-meaning economists struggling to steer markets on the basis of scientifically accurate charts and equations. What better proof of this than the economic booms and busts that we are all getting a taste of. Or if you care to be more pedantic, you can use the words coined by the economists themselves – ‘irrational exuberance’ and ‘negative consumer sentiment.’

But in order to fully appreciate this phenomenon, one need not limit oneself to macrocosmic events. Indeed, some may argue that mass hysteria or herd mentality is a phenomenon all by itself that is very well a contributing factor to such large-scale economic upheavals. So why not revert to the microcosm and consider a far more mundane example – the simple auction. On paper, an auction is merely a trade like any other and, as such, the underlying principle should be the same – i.e. pay according to how you value the offer. Aha! But where it gets interesting is if you pack the players in a room and have them hear each other’s bids. As soon as the bids have faces and voices and personalities, the amygdala shifts into gear, adrenaline surges, emotion kicks in and starts clouding reason. A simple trade has now transformed into a competition. No longer are the players acting through the cold and calculating rationality that supposedly only human beings are capable of. Instead, all the primal instincts of possessiveness, territorialism, assertion, fear, greed have crept in. The results are gratifying if you are the seller. (Of course, in a reverse auction, it’s the sellers pitted against each other so in that case, the buyer is sitting pretty.)

It would seem then that it’s not just crowds that tend to play on our emotions. Even a handful of people or indeed just a single human being can trigger emotional reactions that can dissuade reason and sound judgment. So powerful are these basic instincts that the mere suggestion of a human presence is enough to affect us. Take online auctions, for instance, which are now ubiquitous. Even behind the veil of privacy and without the presence of physical cues in cyberspace, bidders tend to engage actively in competition with user IDs insofar as they represent human actors. If you have ever participated in an eBay auction, chances are you have experienced this first hand. CountSpin is a site that uses a dutch auction process (price keeps dropping till the item sells out), so technically there is no overt competition or counter-bidding. But here too, buyers report an adrenaline-laden shopping experience. Indeed it is this emotional ‘thrill’ that draws them to the site, even though one would expect them to act in a fairly mechanical way by weighing the offer and bidding when the price drops within their acceptable range. But then where is the fun in that – the ‘fun,’ in this case, representing the human element that motivates one to try and ‘beat the system’ or ‘push the boundary,’ however you choose to describe it.

In the end, we can lament the current economic crisis and blame crazy markets, reckless players, unbridled greed, etc… but consider this – we all play a role in driving each other mad. It’s only human!

Some shoppers who were waiting expectantly for the price to go to FREE and were unfortunately disappointed have complained why they didn’t get their free lunch. With respect to their concern, here are some details that may help them understand what’s going on.

Our background is that of a wholesale business that, until last year, supplied merchandise directly to retailers. Many of our customers comprised of arbitrageurs who bought from us to flip (resell) items on eBay and other online sites. Their margins are small when they do this, but they are home-based businesses who flip dozens of deals everyday. Through CountSpin, we have come up with a differentiated way to continue supplying to the arbitrageurs. Even before CountSpin was launched, we reached out to this customer base notifying them that this is the new way for them to do business with us. What this meant is, at launch, we already had dozens of active arbitrageurs around the globe who make a living by monitoring our deals! Thus we are well protected against the contingency of prices going into a complete free-fall. This is not by accident, it is by design. This is not covert; we share this openly.

All we want to do is open up the platform to shoppers who don’t want to pay retail price, but have a genuine chance of scoring great deals on CountSpin by paying a better price than the arbitrageurs. Our traffic from shoppers is still low at the moment, hence we are mainly doing business with arbitrageurs. In fact, arbitrageurs do not get charged any Shipping & Handling fees either in exchange for a monthly membership fee. If you are interested in this monthly membership, write to us at counters@countspin.com.