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13 July 2009 8:00 AM

Best "Worst Idea" of the Day

by Conor Friedersdorf

Mark Gimein:

Imagine for a second that you set out to come up with an online shopping site that would take advantage of everything we've come to know about consumer behavior to separate people from their money in as efficient a way as possible. What would you do? Well, you'd probably try to draw buyers in with bargain prices. You'd pit them against one another in an auction. You'd ask them to make snap decisions without taking much time to figure out just how much money they're spending. On top of that, you'd ask them for only very small amounts of money at any one time, letting payments of a few cents build up to hundreds of dollars.

 

Still trying to figure out how you'd put all that together? You can relax. Someone's already beaten you to it: the folks at Swoopo.com. It's an online auction site that fiendishly plays on every irrational impulse buyers have to draw them in to what might be the crack cocaine of online shopping sites.

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