Contrarian Thoughts On the Best Time to Close an Auction

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The best time to close an auction on eBay might not be what most people think.

The chart below details a couple of interesting statistics about auction style listings on eBay.com.*  The dark bars on the graph indicate the average volume of listings that start/end during a particular hour of the day from a sample of 10,000 auctions.  The light bars indicate the average number of bids placed during a particular hour during the same period.

As you can discern from the chart below, the vast majority of bids occur in the closing moments of an auction.  The vertical bars represent the number of bids.  The bottom axis represents the time until the auction close – with time elapsing from the right side (auction just listed) to left (listing end time).  If you look closely at the left side of the chart, there’s a huge spike of bids that occur in the last hours of auction style listings. 

The conventional wisdom holds that auctions should close when the majority of shoppers are bidding which is around 7:00 pm Pacific time.   After all, you want to fish when the majority of the fish are biting!  As you can see in the first chart above, many sellers follow the conventional wisdom and close in the evening “when the fish are biting.”

But if you are fishing when and where everybody else is fishing, it would stand to reason that competition is limiting the number of fish (sales) you catch and probably the size of the fish (final sale price).  To dispense with the fishing analogy for a while, sellers face stiff competition during the evening time frame.  Although the demand is high during this period (measured in bidding activity), the supply of auctions closing more than keeps up. 

Therefore, if bidding activity increases for a particular auction listing closing in the evening, bidders have plenty of other options closing during same time frame to keep their prices down.

Look at the first chart again.  During the 9:00 am and 10:00 am hours the bidding activity is healthy.  The number of auctions closing during that time frame is small relative to the bidding activity.  Returning to the fishing analogy, there are fish biting during this period, but not many fishermen competing for the catch. 

So, you might want to consider closing your auctions when there is less competition.  Not matter what time of day the auction is closing, the vast majority of the bids occur in the final hour.  If you time your auctions to close when competition is low yet demand is sufficient, you might improve your bottom line.

*Source:  “The Timing of Bid Placement and Extent of Multiple Bidding: An Empirical Investigation Using eBay Online Auctions”

Authors: Borle, Sharad; Boatwright, Peter; Kadane, Joseph B.

Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000123 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

Free Online Photo Editors

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CNET news has a list of 15 online image editing services highlighting and comparing significant features of each.  I’ve provided links to the free online photo editors below.

I’ve got admit that I haven’t used any of these.  I’m still partial to Paint.net (review) which is free and easy to use (both important characteristics for me).  However, from the comments on the original post, pixlr.com has got a lot of fans. 

Post your thoughts about any of these in the comments section.

So, if you’re looking for an online photo editor to spruce up your eBay images, give one of these free services a try:

Search Versus Sort

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Over at Seeking Alpha there’s a blog post discussing eBay’s decision to retire their old search algorithm by the end of April 2009.

According to Jeff King, eBay’s “Senior Director of Finding,”

In a nutshell, it looks at a multitude of details in listings to deliver more of the results you want.  It makes it easy to browse and narrow your selection, and lets you choose how you want to see the results.  With the new auto-complete feature it even ‘anticipates’ what you’re typing in the search box.

Does this mean changes to Best Match?

Not really.

This change (the search algorithm) pertains to what results are returned when a user types a query in eBay’s search box. Best Match (the sort algorithm) pertains to the order in which the results found by the search algorithm is presented to the user.  The user can choose from other sort algorithms such time and price, but Best Match is still the default sort method presented to the searcher.

It’s easy to lump the two together (I do it all the time here) because, to the user, search is search. I type something into the search box and look at the results listed on the results page.  It seems like a single process, however there are two things going on here – search and sort.

According to the announcement, eBay said it would expand its practice of using product details (formerly known as “pre-filled item information”) in listings and said using them is one of the best ways to boost exposure in the new search.  (If anybody is keeping track, I predicted this not too long ago.)

When the Best Match sort algorithm does it’s thing, how do your listings rank?  Learn more about ranking well in Best Match with my free 128 page eBook: Best Match Made Simple.

Auctiva and Procrastination

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One of the things I had on my list of things to do last week was sign up for Auctiva and post a review on the free auction management service.

Over the weekend, some of Auctiva’s servers were infected with a Trojan Horse virus and was apparently infecting users computers with malware.

So, once again, procrastination pays off for me.  Looks like you will have to wait a while longer before I play around with Auctiva and post a review here.  I’ll stick with good old Template-O-Matic for a while longer.

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