Launched 10 years ago, uBid.com has helped customers save hundreds of millions of dollars on computers, electronics, clothing, jewelry, and home & garden products. Since it has strong relationships with the world’s top brands, such as Dell, Sony, and Toshiba, uBid.com can offer their customers various items for incredibly low prices.

Before you can get started in the online auction process, you simply have to sign-up for a free account at uBid.com.  The registration form is short and only asks you to give your name, billing address, daytime phone number, email address and method of payment. uBid.com asks for the method of payment (i.e. credit card) at the beginning because they want to ensure that everyone involved in the auction is a qualified bidder—this protects you from different forms of fraudulent bidding activity. But once you create a user name, you can start bidding immediately!

Most products can be found through the category or keyword search. You can narrow down your search even further by searching through brand, price, and description. For instance, if you are looking to buy a new laptop you can first go to the computer category and click “Laptop Computers.” Then chose the brand you are looking for, “Dell,” and this will bring up all the Dell laptop available.

If this is your first time using uBid.com or any online auction service, you should familiarize yourself with the online auction process. Currently, all uBid auctions resemble a traditional style auction, where one product or a group of identical products are auction at a starting price. Your goal is to outbid other buyers by offering more money for one or more items and the item would go to the highest bidder at the end of the auction time period.

Although you may be tempted to buy for all the items, you should only bid for items that you really want. Placing a bid by mistake or later deciding you don’t want the product can hurt you because all bids are non-cancelable once submitted. So please bid wisely!

Also, don’t be surprised to see auctions still running even though it says it is over their posted closing time. At uBid.com, if there are any bids within the last 10 minutes of auction’s closing time, the auction will be extended until there are no bids for 10 continuous minutes. There is no limit to the number of times an auction can be extended. Therefore, if you are really determined on winning a product, it would be wise to stick around the last 10 minutes of the auction to do some last minute bidding!