When Testimonials Make You Look Bad – The Curious Case of QuiBids

I was watching the television today and an ad popped up from some company.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uj0myI12jw

Now this sounds pretty much like eBay auctions (you can setup an eBay auction)

So if someone really wanted (who is selling these products) to sell iPads and iPods at a starting auction price of $1 why not go to eBay since it all ready has a huge built in audience? In fact if you check the traffic statistics, you’ll find eBay Australia has  an audience of 11 million unique visitors (that’s half of Australia).

But for some reason everyone is putting their product on QuiBids? Hmmm. Interesting, because I’ve never heard about QuiBids.

I thought that maybe I was missing something until this “testimonial” decided to convince me that it was the real deal.

“I got a Mac Book pro laptop for 60 cents!”

…?

…… ?????!!!!

So the hired actor says it can be done!

Wait, so if you website is so successful and thousands of customers are getting great deals… then why do you have to hire an actor to use as a testimonial?

Also I find it hard to believe that iPads are selling at 95% off the RRP as Apple can barely keep up with demand for many of their products.

I decided to check out QuiBids on Google, did you know they are the best online auction site!

Says who?

Of course it’s no surprise that Channel 9 will take on any advertiser at this point as per my recent post.

Apparently what QuiBids fails to mention is that even if that testimonial was a real person, you don’t actually get an iPad for 60 cents, rather it costs 60 cents to bid on the iPad, so that person might have gotten the iPad at let’s say $200 but paid only 60 cents to bid – and remember that it costs you 60 cents every time you bid. So it’s like an eBay auction, except you pay even if you don’t win!

Seriously guys, if a company comes to you with some random website product and the video contains a hired testimonial, my advice is to vet these guys.

Here you can see what others are saying (and it ain’t pretty)