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.
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