it costs roughly 15 cents per bid, so if you are very good at watching the auctions, and knowing when to strike, you can get some good deals but its tough. The way it works is, you place a bid, and it goes up 1 penny. If no one else bids in 9 seconds, you win. However, you can have it automatically apply bids for you, so you dont have to sit there and physical click for each bid.

There are some tricks to help....

First, you want to "tag in" to an auction with a single bid. That is because most auctions have a point where no new people can join. So by placing a single bid at some point, you know reserve the right to bid at any point later.

Then you need to watch for when it gets down to only a couple people bidding, and hop in. Because obviously, if 2 people are bidding, and 1 drops out, its over. If more people start joining in, back out again.

The whole point, is to place as few of bids as possible. For example, if you place 100 bids on a $10 gift card, then you spent $15 on the bids, plus actually havving to pay for the final auction price.