I was bidding on an item and was the winning bidder on an item, when with less than 2 seconds left on the auction, the site went down. Just a few moments later the site came back up but with a different winning bidder. Obviously this was not a system wide outage, but some type of technical glitch. According to an email from BigDeal.com employee "Anthony" "There was a technical issue with the Bid Buddy performance during the time of the auction you referenced which we have corrected. We strongly believe in the soundness of our auction platform but there can be unexpected issues when a new piece of software is plugged in. You should not see the same problem going forward. As always, our aspiration at BigDeal.com is to create the best, fairest, and most trusted penny auction site on the Internet.
OK, I understand that; however the BigDeal.com TOS clearly says "SYSTEM OUTAGES
At present, and with current technology it is not possible to operate with 100% guaranteed uptime.in some cases, system outages may interrupt the ability to view or bid upon auctions.in this case, BigDeal.com will halt all auctions and bidding on those auctions until the system outage is resolved. Auctions that are halted will be clearly designated as such. BigDeal.com will make commercially reasonable efforts to resume the auctions after the outage is resolved.in the event of a system wide outage that prevents you from bidding, BigDeal.com will refund Bid Tokens used in auctions that you were participating in at the time of the auction." Now this was not a system wide outage, but rather a system technical issue and as such, the TOS dictate that the auction be halted and then clearly designated as such. Unfortunately this did not happen.
To add insult, when queried about this issue, BigDeal.com canceled access to their website from my account! Now I have lost access to pending bid credits than I had already purchased. However the final straw is this line under their website entitled "WHAT WE STAND FOR"
We stand for a safe, ethical bidding environment for our customers.
We stand for treating customers the way that we'dlike to be treated with timely responses to customer inquiries and swift resolutions to customer problems.
We stand for common sense, and where common sense and one of our policies differ we'll choose common sense.
So I guess that if you like to be ripped off, have your winning bids not honored have your access further denied, then BigDeal, com is for you! However, if you are looking for a business that treats customers correctly with swift positive resolutions to the issues and where common sense prevails, then shop some where else!
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