|
|
|
Ebay Auction Starting And Ending Day Strategies.
It's usually when auctions are about to end that they get half their bids - sometimes they even get their only bids. If you want your item to sell for a good price, then, it makes no sense to let it finish on a day and time when no-one's going to be...
Online Auctions: New Way of Shopping
Description: Online auctions operate on the same principles as the real auctions, but they have the mass appeal, which reaches out to the ordinary Internet users. They are an easy and fun way to buy a product of your choice. Hearing of auctions...
Six steps towards successful buying at eBay auctions
Buying on eBay can be very rewarding, either in terms of being able to pick up items cheaply or for hunting for hard to find items. Although generally the experience is good, there are instances where things can go badly wrong. These tips, based on...
The Secret Power of an eBay Auction Title
I get frequent emails from my newsletter readers wondering why
their eBay auctions aren't working.
You might have the most brilliant auction description page with
a fantastic set of pictures offering a superb item at an
incredible price....
Winning Auction Photos - The Basics of Producing Auction Images
Basic information about photographing auction items and editing and uploading the images.
April, 2003
Millions of potential buyers visit the online auction sites every day. In 2002 eBay's 27 million active members participated in...
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
What is the best Duration for an eBay Auction?
On eBay you run your auction for a specific duration. Currently,
the options are 1, 3, 5, 7 or 10 days.
But which duration is best for your auction?
In this article, I'll give you some pointers designed to assist
in answering the question.
You might wonder why you would ever wish to have less than the
maximum exposure i.e. 10 days? Surely running your auction for
the longest time would give bidders more opportunity, and
therefore a higher sale price would result? Certainly eBay.com
would appear to think so, as they currently charge a fee of
$0.20 for the privilege of operating a 10 day auction.
However, if you have a very popular item or if you have many
identical items to sell, it may pay you to have a shorter
auction duration. Also, it pays to consider the end point of
your auction very carefully. In addition, if you are running a
Fixed Price auction, there's a little trick you can employ to
give you extra exposure.
So, let's review the elements to consider in the setting of your
auction duration.
a) Start/end day of auction
In my experience, for most categories, the weekend is by far the
busiest viewing period on eBay. I would estimate that around 50%
of views of my auctions take place on Saturday and Sunday. In
setting auction duration, therefore, the weekend peak could be
important to your success.
If you can arrange to end an auction on Sunday night, you get
the benefit of those who wait until the end of the auction to
bid, plus the enhanced viewing traffic numbers which appear
during the weekend.
This means if you're posting an auction on Tuesday night, a 5
day auction could be good.
Having said that the weekend is the busiest for most categories,
some could benefit from a midweek closing date. Items in this
category would include those in which goods are offered for
business users. If your item is targeted at businesses, you want
people to bid for your item while they are at work. In these
instances, make sure your auction covers working days, and
concludes during work time. It has also been found that office
equipment and supplies sell well in the morning.
Be conscious of the time when you post your auction, as this is
the exact time it will finish a number of days ahead. There's
potentially a great deal of difference between an auction
closing at 10 o'clock on Sunday night, and 10 o'clock on Sunday
morning. If you can pitch your auction to be the former, you
could benefit significantly from those extra weekend viewers.
(Note the section on Time Zones later.)
b) Known popularity of the item
If you know your item is very popular, and your past experience
shows that you will always sell at or more than the price you
want, even outside of normal peak periods, then a 1 or 3 day
auction could be appropriate. The benefit of a 1 or 3 day sale
is that you can sell more items, more quickly.
c) Awareness of eBay sort facilities after searching
Whenever eBay's search is used by an eBayer, the default is that
it returns auction titles in the order of how long auctions have
left to run. Auctions which have minutes, or seconds to run,
will appear first in the returned list. Auctions which have 9+
days to run will be at the end. And the list may run to many,
many pages.
Experience has shown that eBayers tend to look only at one or
two pages in returned lists. This means it is important you get
your auction onto these first two pages at some point in its
life - another reason why a 1 or 3 day auction might be better
than a 7 or 10 day duration.
Be aware too that a high proportion of bidding activity takes
place towards the end of an auction. This is natural. Buyers are
on the lookout for bargains. If they can nip in with a bid at
the end of the auction, they might get the item at a good price
and there may not be time for others to top their bid. (Buyers
can also use "sniping" software, designed to place a bid at the
latest possible time on auctions which are of interest to them.)
However, the searcher can easily re-order the returned titles
list. A popular option is to re-order the list into "newly
listed" sequence. The top of the list will now show auctions
which have been newly added to eBay. This is why there is
sometimes a blip of bidding activity at the beginning of an
auction as well as at the end.
d) Time Zones
eBay's default is to
commence your auction from the time you
submit it. As you know, this means it will terminate at that
exact time, the number of days ahead that you select as the
duration. However, if you're offering your item internationally
you should give consideration to the time zone you're aiming for
in terms of auction finish point.
For example, in the USA half of all eBay members reside in the
Eastern Time Zone. So an auction ending at 10pm Pacific Time is
fine for west coast eBay members, but over on the east coast
this is 1am! So you're effectively losing around 50% of
potential bidders at a critical point in your auction.
eBay does provide an option whereby you can schedule your
auction to commence at a specific time (and on another day). In
fact you can set your auction to start at any time and day up to
21 days ahead. This means you can commence your auction
according to the timing you believe will attract the most
viewers. There is a small fee for using this feature.
This is a useful capability if you want to create your listings
in advance, and then have them released onto eBay in a phased
sequence.
e) Fixed Price auctions - Single Item
I mentioned a little trick earlier. Well, here it is. With a
Fixed Price auction for a single item you could consider
managing your auction duration dynamically. You need to be
monitoring your auctions closely i.e. throughout the day, to
undertake this technique.
When bidders do a search on eBay, you know the auctions with the
least amount of time left appear at the top of the returned
list. So it is advantageous to keep the remaining time on your
auction as short as possible. This is a way in which you get
four bites of that cherry for a single listing fee.
1. Start your Fixed Price single item auction off with 1 day
duration. Wait for someone to buy.
2. When the auction has just over 12 hours left, go in to the
auction and revise the auction duration to 3 days. Yes, you can
do this - as long as there is at least 12 hours left. Wait for
someone to buy.
3. When the auction has just over 12 hours left, go in to the
auction and revise the auction duration to 5 days. Wait for
someone to buy.
4. When the auction has just over 12 hours left, go in to the
auction and revise the auction duration to 7 days. Wait for
someone to buy.
5. When the auction has just over 12 hours left, go in to the
auction and revise the auction duration to 10 days. (Don't
forget this will cost you a small fee on eBay.com) Wait for
someone to buy.
6. The auction concludes naturally.
This might look complicated, but it isn't really once you get
the hang of it. Of course, at any point during the above process
someone could buy your item and your auction closes
automatically. If you have another of the same or similar item
to sell, you can re-list it.
f) Fixed Price auctions - Multiple Items
With a Fixed Price auction for multiple items, I would recommend
you set the auction duration to the maximum - 10 days, or 7 days
if you're not prepared to absorb the extra fee on eBay.com.
When you have multiple items it is not advisable to use the ploy
described above for Fixed Price single item auctions. This is
because as soon as you receive a bid (in this case it would be a
Fixed Price sale), you are unable to modify the auction duration
even though you may have many of the multiple items still to
sell.
If you sell all your items within your chosen 7 or 10 days, then
the auction closes automatically anyway.
g) Value Based Formula
If you are happier using a value based formula in setting your
auction duration, here is my rule of thumb for items that I have
not tried to sell before:
Min Bid amounts Set auction duration to £5 - £25 ($10 - $50)
5 days £25 - £100 ($50 - $200) 7 days Over £100 (Over $200)
7 - 10 days
If you're selling items which from experience you know will
definitely be bought at acceptable prices, then you can reduce
the duration.
I hope this outline of selecting the best auction duration
proves useful to you.
About the author:
Brian McGregor is an eBay and internet entrepreneur. He recently
created the 'eBay Master Class' for eBay sellers. For your free
copy, please go to http://www.work
winners.com/ebm-request.htm
|
|
|
|
|
| Yahoo! Auctions - Buy and Sell Sports Cards, Coins, Collectibles ... |
| Experience the best Auctions marketplace. Yahoo! Auctions is now FREE. List your auction for FREE, host your own images or Bid to buy great new and used ... |
| auctions.yahoo.com |
|
| eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles ... |
| ... and everything else on eBay, the world's online marketplace. Sign up and begin to buy and sell - auction or buy it now - almost anything on eBay.com. |
| www.ebay.com |
|
| Auction Fire - Free Auctions - Online Auction Site - Internet Auctions |
| Auction Fire is a free online auction site. An ebay alternative offering free auctions. Internet Auctions Website. Buy or sell in thousands of internet ... |
| auctionfire.com |
|
| U.S. Treasury - Seized Property Auctions |
| Auctions - real estate, cars, trucks, vans, homes, boats, aircraft, motorcycles, jewelry, electronics, antiques, luxury items, furnishings, household goods, ... |
| www.treas.gov |
|
| Government Sales and Auctions: FirstGov.gov |
| Official site for information on all sales and auctions of government surplus property and assets. |
| www.firstgov.gov |
|
| eBay Australia - Buy or sell practically anything on eBay, the ... |
| eBay Australia offers online shopping and online auctions in Australia at eBay.com.au. *Conditions apply. The Buyer Protection Program is subject to the ... |
| www.ebay.com.au |
|
| Clearance Center - Overstock Electronics, Discount Computers ... |
| Provides auctions for computer systems, hardware, and software. |
| clearance.cnet.com |
|
| Indiatimes Auction : Digital Entertainment & Lifestyle Shoppe |
| Indiatimes > Shopping > Auctions. Choose Categories ... Big Brand Auctions. 1.5 T window AC with LCD remote ... Limited Quantity Auctions ... |
| auctions.indiatimes.com |
|
| MSN Shopping |
| Shopping tools including product guides, gift finder and gift certificates and links to online shopping sites with special offers. |
| shopping.msn.com |
|
| Auction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Dutch auction: In the traditional Dutch auction the auctioneer begins with a ... ("Dutch auction" is also sometimes used to describe online auctions where ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
|
| QXL Ricardo plc. the online auction house | Investor Relations |
| Online auction with offers for European consumers, including arts, collectibles, cars, computing, consumer electronics and entertainment. |
| www.qxl.co.uk |
|
| Disturbing Auctions |
| This site is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, ... |
| www.disturbingauctions.com |
|
| Internet Auction List - Largest Auction Directory |
| Find all kinds of auctions divided by types of items. |
| www.internetauctionlist.com |
|
| Overstock Auctions - Online Auctions at Overstock.com - An auction ... |
| Overstock.com Auctions your home for Online Auctions. Find great deals on thousands of live auctions. An alternative to eBay, this auctions site is the ... |
| auctions.overstock.com |
|
| Airline Tickets, Cheap Hotels, Vacation Packages & Travel Deals |
| The internet leader in Travel Auctions & Buy it Now deals to see the world. Our Lowest Price Guarantee on airline tickets, hotels, cruises, ... |
| www.skyauction.com |
|
| onSale.com Low Prices - Computers, Consumer electronics, Digital ... |
| onSale – Don’t just buy it. Get it onSale! onSale has the best selection of computer systems, peripherals, software, iPods, iPod accessories, ... |
| www.onsale.com |
|
| A Survey of Auctions |
| Defines in lay-terms the various types of auctions, including English Auctions, Dutch Auctions, and Double Auctions. A brief history of auctions and ... |
| www.agorics.com |
|
| DoveBid - Industrial Auctioneers, Machinery Auctions, Capital ... |
| Buy & Sell surplus, used business, industrial machinery, laboratory, R&D equipment at DoveBid, the leading global provider of capital asset management and ... |
| www.dovebid.com |
|
| Neopets - New Neopian Auctions |
| Neopets - New Neopian Auctions. Oops! You cannot view this page because you are not logged in, or perhaps you have not created an account yet! ... |
| www.neopets.com |
|
| Car Auctions, Auto Auctions, Online Car Auctions, Salvage Auctions ... |
| Car Auctions, Auto Auctions, Online Car Auctions. Pickles Auctions is an Australian owned Auction company, specialising in auto vehicle, truck and car ... |
| www.pickles.com.au |
|
|