question for auction sellers

[keziak]

I wonder what is your strategy when you have an auction that ends with no bids and few or no views. Do you mostly relist them one or more times? Put them in your store at Fixed Price? Add Best Offer or BIN or drop the price? Get rid of it?

I do various things like that except that I don't put a BIN price on an auction.  I don't have a hard and fast rule or system though. With all the options it's not always cut and dry what to do.  Sometimes my emotions take over, like frustration or pique. 

[chapeau-noir]

@keziak  As a rule I used to run the auction one more time, then move it to FP.

[reallynicestamps]

Auctions don't work for me. When DH insists I run it once, then in a week or so relist at Fixed (higher) Price.

The new Auctions is Best Offer.

You can simplify your life by listing at Fixed Price with Best Offer enabled, and parameters set on Acceptable/Not Acceptable offers.

The listing is up for 30 days rather than seven.

The customer can get the thrill of a bargain by haggling with BO, but the parameters mean you will only see those that are marginally acceptable. And those that are definitely Acceptable will be automatically accepted. 

Between Not Acceptable and Acceptable, you may decide that the new listing has only been up for a day or two and want to wait, or that it has been hanging around for months and you just want to get shut. A gap to allow for thought.

[rileydone]

I run auctions for 7 days; if an item doesn't sell, I'll usually run it 2 more times. If it still doesn't sell, I'll remove it for a while and then relist it or maybe put it in a lot with similar items.

[carolynnq]

If an auction doesn't sell, it shows that the pool of interested buyers is very small (demand is low). If you list it again, you may get one bid, which is fine if your opening bid is an acceptable price. But, in that case, why not just list it as a BIN? So, typically, when an item doesn't sell at auction, I relist it as a BIN at a price higher than the opening bid. Sometimes, it ends up selling for that. If not, the higher price means there is room to lower the price by sending an offer.

[dbfolks166mt]

     I use the auction format exclusively and I do not sell commodity items. Unlike other responders I simply relist the auction generally starting on a Thursday, running for 10 days and ending on a Sunday. I do not use OBO or BIN. Unlike others I do not want to have to be tied to eBay activities 7 days a week. I will run the item for 3-4 months and if it does not sell I look at alternatives but never switch to BIN. 

      I have items cross listed on multiple platforms/venues and a lot of my items sell on other venues and platforms so no big concern if an item does not sell after several listing attempts. 

[onefootflippers]

There are so few competent full time sellers that use auction format with any sort of frequency that I would not expect any actual good answers. Try watching some youtube reseller videos, full time professional sellers just don't use auction format. You really only see it from brand new sellers, part timers who never changed since 1998 and people who are using auction format because they refuse to pay for an ebay store.

[dbfolks166mt]

There are so few competent full time sellers that use auction format with any sort of frequency that I would not expect any actual good answers. Try watching some youtube reseller videos, full time professional sellers just don't use auction format. You really only see it from brand new sellers, part timers who never changed since 1998 and people who are using auction format because they refuse to pay for an ebay store.

     It probably depends on what you consider "full time sellers". There are a number of professional full time auction companies who's entire business model is based around auctions. Up until lately these used to be one of my top sourcing venues but the competition bidding on those sites has driven pricing beyond where you can purchase items and flip them with a reasonable ROI. If I was in fact a "professional seller" I may have started on eBay but would have slowly migrated to my own website and stopped paying eBay's fees. 

     The dilution of the number of auction formats probably has as much to do with how eBay has morphed into more of a commodities marketplace. One thing for sure with BIN is you are NEVER going to get more for an item than what you listed it for unless somebody is trying to scam you. 

     I used to buy a lot on eBay and those purchases were almost always through auctions however a number of events that have caused eBay prices to become less than competitive in the ecommerce marketplace have resulted in me purchasing from other venues. 

     I really don't understand the last part of your statement ".......people who are using auction format because they refuse to pay for an ebay store". Not sure what using the auction format has to do with that. 

[simba6]

You can rotate through such items.  What does not sell today may in a few months.

[turtles-trading-post]

Big words!   It all depends on the market you work in.  I'm in the stamp collecting field and some of the top sellers use auctions exclusively and it's a roaring market for them.  These sellers have built a following of 3-8000 followers... aka "repeat buyers"  who bid regularly.

I described my auction strategy in another thread.

[gurlcat]

Agree 100%!  For rare collectibles with few-or-no sold comps to reference, it can be hard to determine what would be a good BIN price.  And you're absolutely right about how you definitely won't get MORE than your BIN if you price it that way.  So many times I have had BIN listings sell so fast it was clear that I underpriced them, and should have auctioned. 

Sometimes I'll do what I call "reverse auctioning" where I start a listing at a crazy high BIN price, let the listing gather views and watchers, then gradually drop the price until somebody breaks down and buys.  But even that fails sometimes, because what I thought was a "crazy" price turned out to be perfectly acceptable to someone!   In fact my most recent example of this was also the most extreme one, in terms of 'fast'.  Since I couldn't find a single Sold amount for this exact earrings design, I thought I priced it crazy high .... then as I was reviewing how the live listing looked, my phone goes "CHING!"  -I swear no more than 4 minutes had passed.  I even had 'Make An Offer' enabled, but the buyer obviously felt they couldn't risk someone else buying while they waited for a response to an offer.  Like apparently my 'crazy high' was actually 'crazy cheap.' 

[onefootflippers]

---

@turtles-trading-post wrote:

Big words!   It all depends on the market you work in.  I'm in the stamp collecting field and some of the top sellers use auctions exclusively and it's a roaring market for them.  These sellers have built a following of 3-8000 followers... aka "repeat buyers"  who bid regularly.

I described my auction strategy in another thread.

---

You have run 2100 auctions in the last 3 months and of those only  147 sold and of those only 7 got more than one bid. I just don't see that as being more effective than just listing fixed price. However I don't sell stamps so maybe I am missing something. 

------ 

To address comments from others. Live auction companies and companies that are auctioning things on ebay for other people are a different animal entirely.

As for people not wanting to pay for an ebay store I was misremembering thinking that people without a store got a certain number of free auction insertions per month, I was mistaken.

[ekmadonna]

There are HUGE antique dealers on here that use auctions ONLY! 99 cent -9.99 starting bid ALWAYS. And they rake in well over 50,000 a week here some over 100,000, week after week year after year. Your statements are a head scratcher??

[reallynicestamps]

@onefootflippers 

@turtles-trading-post 

EBay auctions don't work for me- again in the philatelic field- but our own auction house just ended a three day session and prices were running 40% above Estimate.

India was remarkably strong.

https://sparks-auctions.com/auction-49/

[reallynicestamps]

Interesting.

Would you give us a few examples of lots that sold recently?