One of the latest penny auction websites to hit the United Kingdom is Bidyell.com
Some of the graphics used on the site are okay which probably stems from the fact that BidYell is part of T-Enterprise a Scottish Games Design & Development Company although I must say considering their forte in hindsight I am probably a little disappointed in the appearance of the website or maybe it’s just another one of those off-the-shelf penny auction websites from our friends at Sonik Technologies that we featured recently.
Regardless of appearance the website itself is very easy to navigate around and seems to have a few innovative ideas like the ‘Knockout Auction’ which seems like a great idea although I personally being a lightweight boxer would not want to find myself up against a Super Heavyweight with his massive arsenal of bids if you get my drift.
The website is relatively new so it is hard to gauge feedback although BidYell does have a forum which attracts transparency and gets the big thumbs up from us. There were a few negative comments in the forum about shipping times but hey I am sure that will be sorted in due course.
On to the technical aspects of the website. I discovered that the website is quite slow and counters are not smooth enough. There is a very good reason for this in that every second the website sends a request of about 20 – 30 KB to its server which updates the clock counter and other stuff on website. The size of request is way too big if you compare it with other websites like Swoopo (1KB), Madbid(1-2 KB), Redbread (1-2 KB). so you could say that this websites bandwidth requirements are 15 – 30 times greater compared to other websites. This website sends data of about 2-3 MB per minute which is HUGE
Has anyone tried this website in FireFox? I tried it on 2-3 different computers and sometimes the website did strange things in Firefox. If anyone else has experienced problems in Firefox we would love to hear from you. The website also has a few JavaScript errors which can affect bidding. Please check the screenshot below.
