Did you know that you can only reply once to questions submitted about eBay listings through their message system?
I learned this yesterday when a potential bidder contacted me to see if I would offer Media Mail as a shipping option. I replied that I would be happy to. Later when I modified the listing to include that particular shipping option, I tried to reply to the same question again in order to let the bidder know. I was greeted by a screen on eBay’s site that stated the question had already been replied to.
I was only able to hope that the buyer would notice that the change had been actually been made and bid. (That person never did place a bid.)
So the lesson here is you only get one shot to answer a question on eBay these days – make sure the answer is complete!
Contrarian Thoughts On the Best Time to Close an Auction
Filed Under Sellers' Insights | Leave a Comment
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)
A recent AuctionBytes blog entry provides another interesting case study of a former eBay seller who found that the grass indeed might be greener outside of eBay.
Much like the scenario in my previous post about Bargainland, Bruce Hershenson was a large volume seller who started selling off of his own platform in reaction to eBay’s policy changes (in this case – fee increases). His site, http://www.emovieposter.com/ , provided more sales than his previous year selling on eBay while incurring less expense.
Bruce left this comment in the remarks area of the blog post:
I full well know that most smaller sellers can’t leave eBay in the way I did, and that is why I very much hope that very soon one of the alternate sites will ”take hold”, and when it does, I urge all of you to give it your full support, for then you will all have a way to leave eBay as I did, if you choose.
I continue to urge small sellers to take initial steps now to wrestle control of their business from eBay. You don’t need to be a big time seller to develop a viable internet presence off of eBay. What you need is a site with good content about what you sell that attracts free traffic from Google and the other search engines. From there you can direct visitors to your eBay listings (an even make a commission doing so under the eBay Partner Network affiliate program) or eCrater or Bonanzle or sell directly off of your site. Visitors to your site will regard you as an authority in your niche and will be predisposed to make a purchase from you vice another seller.
If you should decide to change venues for selling, you already own your traffic, so shifting to a platform other than eBay is as simple as changing the links on your site. So, as Bruce stated above, when “one of the alternate sites ‘takes hold’,” you’re ready to act.
An excellent example of this technique is provided by AuctionBytes’ Ina Steiner in the book, Blogging Heroes:
One eBay seller I know writes a blog devoted to mugs, and he includes pictures, descriptions, and advice on interesting mugs he finds. This is a great way to serve his customers by providing content that’s of interest to them. In addition, he builds up a following of people who are more likely to buy from him in the future, and shoppers doing searches for those types of products will find his blog — and his listings.
You can find a couple of other interesting case studies of this technique on this link:
http://auctions.sitesell.com/insights2.html
Partial Refunds – Another Method of Increasing Your S&H DSR
Filed Under Best Match, Sellers' Insights | 3 Comments
In my last post, I discussed a tactic that I employed successfully to increase my eBay Detailed Seller Rating (DSR) for Shipping and Handling Fees to 4.7 – the threshold required for “increased exposure” under the Best Match search algorithm.
For many sellers, those who sell at a fixed-price or sell goods that are expensive to ship, offering a $0.99 shipping and handling fee just doesn’t make good business sense.
So, here’s another idea to help sellers in this situation draw attention to the fact that they offer “5-Star” service and value in the shipping and handling aspect of the sales transaction: provide small refunds to the buyer for “excess shipping fees paid.”
If you use PayPal, this technique is fairly simple. List your auction with whatever you normally charge for shipping and handling. As you ship the item, choose a shipping method that does not display the postage fee and then immediately send your bidder a partial refund via PayPal for $0.50 – $0.75. Include a note explaining that you overestimated the shipping and handling costs and that the customer was due a partial refund.
Is this technique manipulative or deceptive? Maybe – but it’s no more deceptive than eBay making the customer think that a 4-Star Shipping & Handling DSR rating is “Reasonable,” even though, according to eBay’s Pinks, sellers with a (“Reasonable”) 4.0 average S&H DSR, ”represent the bottom 1% of all sellers.” Until the system is fixed, sellers need to work within it in order to stay afloat.
The purpose here is to draw attention to the fact that you actually charge “Very Reasonable” shipping fees – and if it takes a small refund to make the bidder notice that fact, then so be it.
Odds are that your buyer will be delighted with your shipping and handling fees.
Issuing a partial refund to someone who made a payment via PayPal is relatively painless. PayPal will even return to your account whatever fees you’ve paid for that portion you refund, however small.
Here’s the instructions from PayPal’s website:
In addition to being able to refund your buyer anytime within 60 days of receiving a payment, you can also opt to send a partial refund.
Your original transaction fee will be credited to you. When issuing partial refunds, a portion of the original fees paid will be returned to you.
Here’s how it works:
- Log in to your PayPal account.
- Click the History sub-tab.
- Find the payment you would like to refund.
- Click Details to open the Transaction Details page.
- Click the Refund Payment link.
- Enter the refund amount and click Submit