My EBay Life
(A series of essays about what it is like to sell stuff on EBay)
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You have probably already heard that EBay is offering Free Auction Style Listings for shop owners for the rest of this month That always sounds really great and perhaps I should do some more experimenting but here is what I have found in the past.
1) I don't sell much at auction. The last time EBay offered a three day Free Auction Style listing I moved around 45 listings from my Fixed Price Good Til Cancelled format to the auction style format. In many cases lowering the starting bid. I sold exactly 2 items one of them for 99 cents.
2) My items do not cause bidding wars (ie: if I sell something it just has one bid)
3) If I try to entice buyers with low starting bids like 99 cents I just end up giving my stuff away (see reason number 1 & 2 above)
4) Auction listings take more of my time because most of them end up having to be re-listed.
When I saw that EBay was giving us almost a whole month of Free Auction Style listings I was tempted to give it a try with my new listings. Having determined not to get caught up in moving a bunch of older listings like I did last time. But then I thought about it and my intuition tells me that my items are, for lack a of better word, "stumbled up" items. Sure you can search on red blouse and my item will come up but so will lots of others that are priced higher and lower and in the end I just have to wait for the person who likes my red blouse and thinks it is worth what ever I am asking for it. In most cases that takes time and that is what Fixed Price GTC listings provide. This leads me to my final reason and that is..
5) Once my buyers have stumbled onto my item and have decided that they want to buy it I assume that they want to pay and be done and that waiting for the auction time period to end is more af an annoyance then anything else.
It's important to know your products and the best way to sell them and I should probably continue to test my theories but I think I am going to sit this one out.
Happy EBaying,
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