Last Minute Auction – An Hour or Less, A Buck or Less

Mike Powell and Juergen Horn came up with an simple idea: gather all auctions on eBay with one dollar or less and with just one hour left to see what kind of bargains they can pick up. When their search resulted in over 30,000 auctions, they decided to capitalize on it. LastMinute Auction was the result and this ReviewMe review is the buzz to kick start it to a mainstream site.

What Is LastMinute Auction?

LastMinuteAuction.com gives consumers a neat new way to hunt for bargains on eBay. The service is completely free to use. The site searches for eBay auctions that ends in one hour and for items that are prices under $1. The items are displayed as a list on the front page. By clicking on the product link, you’ll be directed to the item’s auction on eBay.

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The front page shows all the latest auction from every category. You can target your search among 30 categories, from antiques all the way to video games. The site also offers a feature to manage favorite categories and geotargeting for Germany, Britain, Italy, Australia and Spain.

In addition to displaying the current bids, the list shows how many minutes until the auction expires, how many bids have been made and how much shipping and handling cost (more than the bids in almost all cases).

Doesn’t eBay Already Offer This Sort of Search?

You would think so, but in fact they don’t. If you want to search eBay for all auctions that are one dollar or less, you can’t specify time remaining and vice versa. Additionally, you can only browse through one category at a time and even then you’ll have to contend with a large amount of “Featured Items” which are usually way more expensive than a dollar.

A Fantastic Example of an Affiliate Site

LastMinute Auction is a fantastic example of an affiliate site done right. It has all the right ingredients: self-updating content, useful information and perceived value for the end user. The site pretty much runs itself. All its information are supply from eBay. The information is always changing because each auction has only one one hour left. This encourages bargain hunters to check the site often.

The site makes most of its income from the eBay affiliate program. When bargain hunters click on any of the auction links and makes a winning bid or Buy It Now (BIN), LastMinute Auction gets a share of the revenue generated. Supplemental income is made by two banner ads.

eBay addicts will find LastMinute Auction a great resource to check every hour. John Chow dot Com readers wanting to make money online will be adding LastMinute Auction to the “Damn! Why didn’t I think of this?” category.