Ahem, actually it's just a scam, in it's purest form. No, it doesn't qualify as gambling because your chance to win is not determined by luck but solely at the discretion of the people running the show.
Imagine you enter a casino and someone offers you the following game:
There's a red button, one push costs $1. Anyone may push as often as they want and can afford. If the button isn't pushed for one hour then the last person who had pushed receives $1000 USD (fixed).
Fine you may think, I'll come here at thanksgiving when nobody is around and push it then. Except that there's always this one sleazy guy lurking in the corner, even at thanksgiving, with that strangely swollen thumb and an seemingly unlimited budget...
Even with the new option to buy the products at full price, it would still be a scam since they've acquired customers by cheating them into thinking they would have the possibility to buy at a discounted price.
Anyway, there's an issue with the transparency of their operations which is not required in an auction site like ebay since on ebay the winner of the auction must be real, in order to buy the item from the seller.
In reality you don't hire people for that, way too risky.
You simply have a few "good friends" run a bidbot-script on some leftover machines. That's near impossible to detect (just create new accounts and cycle credit cards regularly) and makes the scheme entirely bulletproof.
Well, I agree that there's nothing morally wrong about it in the abstract (but I think gambling is quite all right too, if the rules are on the up and up), but we don't know that they're not cheating.
They could have people acting as shills, "winning" the items and ensuring that no goods ever have to actually be delivered, or even exist at all. This would be impossible for a casual user to detect.
