And in the "What was I thinking?" Department...

[a_c_green]

...I just realized that I started a couple of 7-day auctions last night that will therefore end on Thanksgiving evening, right when everyone is sleeping off their big meal.

I have got to start paying more attention to the calendar. 🙄

[chickadee8618]

Not necessarily a bad thing....some people might be finishing their meals and going right to their computer or phones to start some early Christmas shopping...you just never know.  But I think definitely it wont be as many people as it could have been because of the holiday.

[vintage-camerastuff]

let us know the day after how you did with those auctions.

[a_c_green]

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@vintage-camerastuff wrote:

let us know the day after how you did with those auctions.

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Sure will. Ping me if I forget. 😊

[silverstatetreasureboxes]

@a_c_green 

What and "sleeping" off their big meal??  You know nobody puts their phones down for such trivial things as Sleep! 

     I personally think this will be a good thing. Have a great Thanksgiving yourself.

[toomuchstuffagain35]

There's also a lot of people who don't celebrate TG.

Do you sell internationally?

[onefootflipper1]

Back when I did auctions (which I don't suggest anyone do anymore for 999 items out of 1000) I found thanksgiving evening to be a good night to end them on. Most people are not asleep, instead you have a bunch of people with spare time on their hands because the "dinner" event was over at 4 PM. 

[cashmeredelight]

might be great for you. guys will be watching football games

[chapeau-noir]

I tend to think people don't live in lock-step that much, especially nowadays - there will be plenty of people around NOT sleeping off T'giving dinner so might not be so bad.

[roadking5555]

Not a bad thing. I don't eat the stuffing....and while everyone is snoozing after the meal, I start my eBay browsing for deals!

Good Luck and Happy Thanksgiving sales!

[tobaccocardyahoo]

It looks like you, like many of us have a portion of your auctions which only get one bid.

Did you list items that you expect to have a real auction or items which are likely to sell on one bid? Or do you know?

I suspect you might not get more than one bid on a Thanksgiving night auction but that is not all that out of the ordinary.

[retro_entertainment_collectibles]

Crommin' cents would say Fridays, Sat's ending around 10 - 11 PM EST be optimal.  That's what we used to do with Onsale, uBid and others.  Catch easterners before they hit the hay and be in 7-8 PM zone for the West Coast though some Sat's we'd end at 12 PM and that worked out too.

[retro_entertainment_collectibles]

Additionally, I can't recall the venue we'd sold at, maybe Auction World back in the day.  Anyways, site had auctions and fixed pricing... So what we'd do is with all fixed priced listings we'd promote the auctions providing a HTML link to the auctions landing page.  We'd had an a 1x1 background pixel on one of webstores that we also put into the ad enabling us to measure the difference and it was quite significant.  About 55% back in the day as I recall click through the fixed price items to see the auctions.

[gb58]

Twenty years ago, when things actually sold well on this site, I would schedule tons of listings to go off Thanksgiving evening.  It was a great time to have listings go off, because as soon as the Turkey is gone, the thought of Christmas shopping begins.

I don't know if that has changed any through the years, because now most of my listings are fixed price.

[a_c_green]

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@tobaccocardyahoo wrote:

It looks like you, like many of us have a portion of your auctions which only get one bid.

Did you list items that you expect to have a real auction or items which are likely to sell on one bid? Or do you know?

In the distant past (I've been here since 2004), I listed everything by auction, but then again, I think we all did. BuyItNow fixed-price was introduced a little while after I started on eBay, and now most of my niche market listings (vintage bicycle parts and restoration items) are Fixed Price, as they tend to be long-tail items that will eventually find a buyer who needs that very thing. Ones that are more rare or sought-after are listed as auctions. Of my 40 most recently sold auctions, only 14 were single-bid; the rest went for more, and sometimes a lot more.

So, I'm okay with choosing which will be Fixed Price and which are auctions, but I try to avoid ending auctions during some big event that might have peoples' attention elsewhere, such as Christmas Day, the Super Bowl, 4th of July, etc. Normally I avoid Thanksgiving for the same reason, but this year I just forgot.

What I normally do for a big holiday or other national event is actually to load up extra auctions for some premium items that I know will do well, but I schedule them to end after that day, not on it. That way the auctions will be visible to those who are browsing in their spare time during the holiday, but I don't have to mess around with answering last-minute questions, or packing up items that sold on a day when there was no post office service anyway.

(I do ship internationally if I get a buyer overseas, but the majority of my sales are domestic, so I just focus on what's going on in this country on any given day.)