Category Archives: Empowr

In this 16 minute video, Neal Walters shows how

Bidding on the same item counts toward closing the loop with a person, but doesn’t count toward meeting your goal of bidding.  Because of that, Neal suggests you rotate between categories, for example, one day bid on Computer Tablets, then Jewelry, then Sporting Goods, and so on.  He also recommends bidding on products you are familiar with.  Like in the old TV game show, “The Price is Right”, it helps when you know the products in a category well, and you know what the price (and shipping) should be for both new and used items.

When displaying products to bid on in the marketplace, make the following selections:

1. First pick a merchandise category
2. Click on the Sort: “Price: lowest first”
3. Click on the checkbox “Only show if ships to the United States” (or whatever your country is
4. Then in the bottom right corner, select the “Items per page” to the max of 200.

Neal warns against bidding on something with an outlandishly high shipping price; just skip over those and don’t bid on them.

He then shows an item, let’s call it a widget, that has a bid price of 6 cents, and “Free Shipping”.  Neal says there are four things that could happen if he bids on it:

1. He might have to buy it for 6 cents – no big deal, that won’t break the bank, will it
2. He can choose to sponsor it.  That means it will go back for auction under his account, and if he sells it for more than 6 cents, he gets 95% of the additional amount, and the original seller will get 5% of the additional amount.
3. He might get outbid by someone else
4. The seller might have a “Reserve Price” on the item above the current bid price of 6 cents.  For example, in the video, the “widget” is actually an amplifier.  More than likely, the seller will have put a reserve price of at least $10 or $20 on it, so he can make some money, and cover the cost of shipping (since he listed the item as “free shipping”).

At 4:41 in the video, Neal mentions that you should be bidding on products and services that you really want; and you can change or increase the bid if you really want to win the auction for that product. However, the Empowr ecosystem requires you to often make dozens or even hundreds of bids (at the higher power levels), and thus you really don’t want to “win” 100 auctions per day, right?

At 4:50 – Neal quotes the Wikipedia definition of the greater fool theory:

The greater fool theory states that the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price can be justified by a rational buyer under the belief that another party is willing to pay an even higher price.

He also mentions the historical event called “Tulip Mania” or “Tulip Fever” that happened in the Holland in 1637.

You can also look at how many people bid, and how many days are left on the auction before it closes.  This helps you to know if the item is popular, and might help you “guestimate” if someone is likely to outbid you.

At 10:00 he re-iterates that you should bid on products you know.  I.e. you should have an idea of the supply and demand of that product in the world in general, and you should have a good idea of what the winning bid should be.  For example, if you are bidding for a guitar on Empowr, it would be helpful to know what guitars of similar quality sell for at Walmart or a local music store, and what an online site would charge you to ship a guitar to your home.

You can report a seller you lists a product in the improper category.

Neal shows his own statistics, that he must make about 330 bids per day to reach his “daily goal”.  That’s because he is at the Teal Level 2 Power Level.  A beginner, at the lower power levels, might only need to make 10-30 bids per day.

If you don’t know what Empowr is, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neLesq3TFD0&t=1s This video shows some bidding strategies with the Empowr social network. To meet your “daily goals”, you basically have to bid on dozens or even hundreds of marketplace items. This then raises the question of how to bid on all these items to make your goal, without the fear of winning them all and spending all your hard-earned money, or getting a stack of boxes delivered to your front step.

As of the date of this post, Empowr is in theory rewarding people who meet their daily goals with an AMCO (Accelerated Matured Cash Out) at the end of the month. Bot Poster has provided this new video.

You are considered to have met your daily goal if you do so in all four areas:

<ol>
<li>Bid – bidding on items in the marketplace
<li>List – listing an item for sale in the marketplace
<li)Post – posting your own status, picture or video
<liShare – clicking like, repost, or making comments
</ol>

How many of these you are required to do depends on your current “Power Level”.

Aisha explains how the AMCO is achieved.  Note: The system does change from time to time, and the concepts of the AMCO have changed since this video was created.  However, the basic concepts are still good.  AMCO stands for Accelerated Matured Cash Out, a term introduced by Empowr (former FanBox) in the summer of 2016. Other cashouts require 90-days of “maturing” or “maturation”, and further, people often don’t cash out because they use their “earnings” to Power-Up to higher levels.

The basic idea is to complete your daily goals: 1) Bid, 2) List, 3)Post, and 4) Share.  You don’t have to fill out all the bonuses.

Do you daily goal at least one day per month; and the more days you do it, the more you could earn. There is a chart now that shows which days you have met the goals.

A month or two after this video was made, the system was “relaxed” somewhat to allow more people to get AMCO’s.

If you always post good ads for your listing, your listing will be auto-approved.  But if enough are disapproved, you fall into a status where each listing must be manually approved.  With manual approval, the auction item may not be approved until a day or two later.  At the time she made this video, that was critical, but now under the relaxed rules it is a little less important.

Selling valuable items will help your AMCOs be larger.  The company website also suggests you sell to a wide variety of people (to avoid colusion and manipulations by a small group of friends cross-buying each otherproducts, just to get the AMCOs).

Aisha suggests the term “transactional trust”.  Bidding on items that a person is selling is a fast way to “close the circle” and build trust with a person.

The “daily goals” are a good idea, because people have any idea of how hard they need to work, i.e. how much work they have to put into the system.  Aisha actually got $600 AMCO.

Another tip is to use pick your top 25 people, by clicking the “star” on the “People I Trust” screen.  You are limited to starring 25 of them.

Note however that eventually Aisha left Empowr, concluding that Empowr is a “fraud site”.