The conventional wisdom has it that second-hand cars are not well-suited for selling online, because the prospective buyers do want to check out the car before buying it: to test-drive it, examine the seats, kick the tires.  That is why the cars for sale on bidorbuy are as a rule listed in the classified section.  Most sellers think that this format works well for cars so well, in fact, that there are now about 35,000 cars listed on the site. Listing in the classified section means that, for a R50 fee, you can put up the picture and description of the car, as well as your contact detail,  and wait for a buyer to call you.

Quite apart from these considerations, not many sellers are prepared to put items of such high value as cars can be on a R1, no-reserve auction. The seller of this particular car, the Mercedes-Benz CLK320 Cabriolet, who goes under the bidorbuy user name MissSale, seems rather confident as far as the performance on the auction goes. She is much more concerned about the winning bidder not being able to fulfil her or his obligation and see the transaction through in “real life”. That is why she is asking the bidders to bid only if they have cash, or if they know that their bank is ready to grant them finance.

To add to the thrill of having such a beauty on a R1, no-reserve auction, bidorbuy is inviting South African bloggers to try to guess what the highest bid will be at the close of the auction on Thursday 27 November. Therefore, bloggers, follow the rules posted on the Best Guess Competition page and you may win R300 cash prize.

As you already know from our blog entry aptly named Blog and win R300 every week, bidorbuy recently invited South African bloggers to guess the highest bid of the high-value items offered on the One Day, One Rand no-reserve auctions running on Thursdays. The VW Tena City had the honour to kick-off the Best Guess competition for the bloggers. Next week, bloggers will be tasked with best-guessing the winning bid for a VW Polo Hatch. By the way, the prize money remains the same: R300.

So far, so good. We have the explanation for both cars and bloggers.

But how did the bakers make their way into the title of this story?

Well, the bakers came in thanks to the entry posted by Mike in his Living in Jozi blog.

After duly placing his Best Guess for the bidorbuy competition, Mike happened to mention the Worldwide Blogger Bakeoff and said: “Should my guess at the closing bid in the auction be the closest and by some strange tear in the stitching of our universe, I win the monetary prize, I will donate it to the Blogger Bakeoff”.

A bit of investigation revealed that the Worldwide Blogger Bakeoff is an online campaign that challenges bloggers to get involved in a drive to alleviate poverty in Africa by baking a loaf of bread, blogging about it, and donating dough to Breadline Africa. For its part, Breadline Africa will use the money to convert used shipping containers into permanent structures that can serve as classrooms or as soup kitchens.

Amazingly enough, of all the bloggers who entered the bidorbuy Best Guess competition, Mike was the closet to the highest bid for the VW Tena Citi: his guess was only R867 off the winning amount of R66,600.

Upon learning that he had won, Mike’s comment was: that is a small miracle in itself!

Indeed it is. Luckily, there are no visible tears in the stitching of our universe. But there will be more “dough” in the bank for the Breadline Africa project!

It does not matter what you blog about. The only two things that matter are: that you do blog and that you like the excitement of a competition.

If you are a South African blogger who fulfils these two simple requirements, visit the bidorbuy VW Tena Citi auction page and tell us at what price you think the auction will close. Note down your forecast in your own blog, include the link to the VW Tena City auction page (here is the link in longhand: http://www.bidorbuy.co.za/jsp/item/Item.jsp?Trade_TradeId=9716372). Then send the URL of your blog posting to promotion@bidorbuy.co.za. We shall contact you if you are the winner, get your bank details and transfer the prize amount of R300 into your account. Please note that the prize will be paid only into a South African bank account.

Your forecasts must be recorded before the auction opens – that is, before 9am on Thursday 23 October 2008 for this coming Thursday. The email with your blog details must reach promotion@bidorbuy.co.za by 9am on the same day.

If two or more bloggers come with the same closest winning bid estimate, the blogger who posted his or her entry first will win the bidorbuy car auction competition.

bidorbuy plans to make the “best guess” car auction competition a regular event for South African bloggers. Make sure to check which car is on auction every week. You will find the current auction by clicking on the car featured in the upper right hand site of the bidorbuy home page. However, do make sure that the car is one-day-R1-auction (bidorbuy also features cars in its Cars on sale section).

Then blog about the price you expect the current car will achieve on the auction before the auction opens, and send the URL of your blog to promotion@bidorbuy.co.za.

To help you in your task of guessing the highest bid for VW Tena Citi, take a look what price some other new cars auctioned on bidorbuy were sold at:

• 2008 Chery QQ3 8.0 TE. Market price: R59,900.00; winning bid: R50,051.00
• 2008 VW Tena City 1.4l. Market price: R75,300; winning bid: R68,000.00
• 2008 Suzuki Swift. Market price: R131,900.00; winning bid: R123,506.00
• 2008 Toyota Yaris. Market price: R100,300.00; winning bid: R88,200.00