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What is the best Duration for an eBay Auction?
But which duration is best for your auction?
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.
g) Value Based Formula
If you are happier using a value based formula in setting your
auction duration, here is my rule of thumb for items that I have
not tried to sell before:
Min Bid amounts Set auction duration to 5 - 25 ($10 - $50)
5 days 25 - 100 ($50 - $200) 7 days Over 100 (Over $200)
7 - 10 days
If you're selling items which from experience you know will
definitely be bought at acceptable prices, then you can reduce
the duration.
I hope this outline of selecting the best auction duration
proves useful to you.
About the author:
Brian McGregor is an eBay and internet entrepreneur. He recently
created the 'eBay Master Class' for eBay sellers. For your free
copy, please go to http://www.work
winners.com/ebm-request.htm