Quick answer: Cigarbid can beat retail on premium boxes when bidding stays disciplined, but its savings claims key off inflated list prices, shipping bills per invoice, and most sales are final. Treat it as entertainment with occasional steals, not a default way to buy. Check any lot against live retail prices before you bid.
Every cigar forum on the internet has the same nickname for Cigarbid: the devil site. The people who coined it keep bidding anyway, some of them for twenty years straight. Both halves of that sentence are true, and together they answer the question better than any star rating. This is the part the review pages skip, so let's do the math the auction never shows you. When you want the shortcut instead, our verified deals feed lists only cigars currently priced below every store we track, receipt attached, which makes a handy benchmark to keep open in the next tab.
Is Cigarbid Worth It?
Cigarbid is worth it for two kinds of buyers: collectors hunting premium boxes below street price, and smokers who enjoy the auction itself. It is a poor fit for anyone who just wants the lowest price on a specific cigar. Cigarbid is Cigars International's auction site under Scandinavian Tobacco Group, and its listed retail anchors run high, so a winning bid can look like a steal while landing above what fixed-price stores charge the same day. Shipping is billed per consolidated invoice rather than per order, refunds are limited to short, damaged, or defective shipments, and every other sale is final. PissedConsumer's aggregate tells the story in one pair of numbers: reviewers score Cigarbid 2.9 out of 5, yet 71 percent still say they would recommend it. Fun is doing the heavy lifting. Price, on its own, is not.
How Cigarbid Actually Works
Cigarbid runs several formats at once, and the format decides how much strategy matters.
- Standard auctions: bid, wait, highest bidder wins when the clock runs out. Boxes, 5-packs, and singles each get their own lanes.
- Free Fall: the price starts high and drops in real time until someone clicks to accept it. Blink late and it's gone; click early and you paid more than the next guy would have.
- QuickBuy: a fixed price you can take instantly. QuickBuy purchases are final, and a QuickBuy can pull quantity out from under an auction still in progress.
- Power Hour: fast-format premium lots on Tuesday evenings.
Then comes the bill. Winning bids stack onto a consolidated invoice, daily or weekly, and shipping is calculated per invoice. Separate invoices never combine. That one rule shapes everything about how veterans use the site: they pick weekly invoicing and pile wins into one shipment, because freight on a lone 5-pack can erase the discount that won the auction.
Where the Savings Leak
Four leaks, all documented by the site's own longtime users.
The anchor price. Auction savings
are measured against a listed retail price, and cigar list prices run famously high. A regular on the CigarPass forum put it plainly years ago: people get caught up bidding and think they are getting a deal because they see the inflated retail number, then pay more than regular mail-order prices. The percentage on the screen tells you the distance from a number almost nobody pays. It tells you nothing about the price the same cigar sells for today at a fixed-price store.
The freight math. One CigarPass member closed his account after winning four items totaling $20 and getting billed $29.00 in shipping. That is the extreme case, but the per-invoice mechanic guarantees smaller versions of it every day. The defense is volume, which is how a $12 win becomes an $80 box of things you didn't plan to own. The devil-site nickname is about freight amortization as much as bidding fever.
The exit door. Refunds cover shortages, missing items, and damaged or defective goods. Everything else is final. Win a lot at a bad price and the site owes you nothing, which is fair for an auction and still worth saying out loud before your first bid.
The stick itself. Condition complaints show up often enough to matter: dry cigars, old inventory, tired bands. One tobacco review site put Cigarbid on its worst-places-to-buy list on exactly those grounds. Plenty of shipments arrive perfect. The complaint rate is not zero, and with final sales you are the one holding the risk.
When Cigarbid Wins
An honest verdict has to concede the wins, because they are real.
Premium boxes go below street price there, and not rarely. Forum haul threads are full of $40 to $50 boxes that fixed-price stores listed much higher, and super-premium sticks sometimes close at numbers a retailer cannot advertise. Five-pack auctions remain a cheap way to sample lines you'd never gamble a box on. And the entertainment is genuine: watching a Free Fall with your finger over the button beats scrolling a category page, which is exactly why a 2.9-star site keeps a 71 percent recommend rate.
The pattern across two decades of forum threads is consistent: the everyday stuff and mid-tier 5-packs tend to close near or above what disciplined retail shopping costs, while patient bidders on premium boxes occasionally land real steals. The users who come out ahead treat it like a game with a bankroll, not a store.
Cigarbid vs Cigar Page
These two get compared constantly, and the ownership story alone is worth the click. Cigarbid belongs to Cigars International, part of Scandinavian Tobacco Group. Cigar Page is independent: its parent company Brandshopper was started by Keith Meier, who co-founded Cigars International back in 1996 and sold it years before building the new operation. In 2021, halfwheel reported that the family behind Oliva took a stake in Brandshopper. So the daily-deal site and the auction site are run by two generations of the same founding playbook, on opposite teams.
The buying experience splits cleanly:
