The secret is out: having successful e-bay auctions begins with where you end, and the magic hour is eight o’clock.
- Buyers often outbid the “Buy it now” price. For popular eBay auctions 45 to 50 percent of buyers exceeded the “buy it now” price, artificially raising the price of these goods.
- The percentage of daily bids is highest at 8pm. The percentage of closing auctions is also highest at 8pm. The study states that this may be counterproductive since it creates greater competition for bidders attention at a fixed time. So maximize your bid chances and set your auctions to close at 8 in the evening!
- Buyers seem to favor auctions with more bidders. No one wants to feel like they are bidding on unpopular/unwanted merchandise.
- comparison of music CD auctions with equal price + shipping costs, revealed that low price, high shipping cost auctions attracted more bids, more bidders, and 25 percent more money. Few people take the time to research how much shipping costs are, and sellers mercilessly use this to their advantage by padding shipping prices.
- Secret reserves turn off buyers and drastically lower sales.
- eBay attracted almost 60 percent more bidders and 30 percent higher prices than the same items on Yahoo Auctions. This is no surprise – eBay is the Microsoft Windows of auctions.
Researching the psyche of compulsive shoppers gives interesting results. This eBay study is taken from UC Berkeley and also discussed in Tech Crunch.
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One Response
We use ebay to auction off our old domain names, it makes a bit of extra cash each month.