Jun
20
eBay Consumer Demographics
Filed Under Sellers' Insights | Leave a Comment
This post summarizes a published academic paper that contrasts the demographics of people who buy on eBay and those that don’t. The study finds that family size, consumption motivation, and perceived economic threat are key characteristics that impact participation as a bidder on eBay.
Identifying characteristics of your customers or audience is a fundamental marketing principle. If you are selling on eBay, what research have you done into the demographics of your customers?
Although different niches within eBay are going to have different demographics — the football jersey collectors are likely to be a different lot than the people who bid on knitting supplies — there are some general characteristics that apply to the eBay customer base as a whole. Some of these are identified in a paper titled “A Comparison of the Characteristics of eBay Consumers and eBay Nonconsumers” written by Professor Gregory S. Black and published in the Sept ‘07 issue of Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice.
Here are some highlights:
The research found that eBay consumers have larger families than do nonconsumers.
Several possible reasons may contribute to this finding. Consumers from larger families have more household expenses and must expend more resources to provide clothing, etc, for their families. eBay is a known source of ‘good deals’, and the motivation to be more fiscally frugal for these larger families may lead them to make eBay purchases. …eBay might also be a time-saving resource to consumers from larger families.
It also noted that eBay consumers have a higher consumption motivation than nonconsumers.
Consumption motivation is a concept describing a consumer’s desire to have an objectively satisfying buying experience. …One can easily compare prices, sellers (by looking at feedback ratings) and products on eBay and then determine how much one is willing to pay for that item. If the selling prices actually exceeds the price the consumer is willing to pay, the consumer will not have to purchase that particular item and will face no discomfort in having to tell a sales person ‘no’. The consumer can then find another similar item and bid on it. This consumption motivation may be more difficult to experience in a brick-and-mortar shopping experience because of the extra time and other resource requirements.
Finally, eBay consumers perceive a higher economic threat than nonconsumers.
Economic threat can be defined as the degree to which a person believes that the security of the domestic economy is threatened by foreign competition.
When’s the last time you thought about who your eBay customers are?
Jun
13
Here’s a list of the top ten mistakes to avoid when prepping images for your eBay auctions.
We’ve all seen them. On many occasions, they made us hit the back-button as quickly as we came. I’m talking about lousy pictures on eBay listings. At best, they are embarrassing. At worst, they are misleading and borderline fradulent because they misrepresent the item being sold. Usually, they just give potential bidders a bad impression of the seller’s dedication to quality which is not the image they should be trying to convey.
Photo mistakes are seemingly epidemic on eBay. To give you an idea of how common the problem is, it took me less than an hour of poking around the action site to find the examples below.
- Out of Focus If the auction photo is out of focus, how is the buyer to confirm the item’s condition? To help with focus, use a tripod or other solid surface to help you keep the camera steady. Overall, an out of focus image makes me question the quality of the seller. Are they deliberately trying to mislead me? If they can’t manage to focus the camera, can they manage to pack the item for shipping?
(Remember, these are real auction photos - I can’t make this stuff up!) - Distracting Backgrounds A good eBay photo keeps the prospective buyer focused on the item being sold. It should be free of distractions in the background. While a couch is not a horrible background for your eBay image, I might be subconciously judging you as a seller by your taste in furniture relative to my own. Tossing a plain, clean, light colored blanket over the furniture in the background would keep me focused on your item.
How’s this for a distraction? This pictures beow are from an auction for a car trunk part. Note the seller’s tongue and face peeping through the hole. Creepy!
- Glare Glare is usually caused by a reflection of the camera’s flash on a shiny surface. To prevent glare, try taking the picture with an indirect light source such as next to a window on a sunny day, outside on a cloudy day, or with some lamps providing light from the side or an angle. If you choose to take the picture next to a sunny window, make sure that the window is on the side and not in the background - otherwise you will have a silhouette in front of an overexposed background.
- Stealing Other People’s Pictures If you pull it straight from their server, the other seller might swap the image file your “borrowing” with something like the one below. See how many bids that gets you…
- Clutter Again, you want potential bidders to focus on what you are selling. Remove or cover the background clutter whenever possible.
- File Size I’m not going to slow down my page loading time by including an example of a massive image file that is still too common on eBay. Suffice to say that they still aren’t hard to find. Huge image files make your auction take too long to load and cause potential bidders to scroll up & down, left and right to see the different parts of whatever widget you are selling. Both issues will cause the visitor to click on the back button long before they click on the bid button. Remember, just because you have broadband internet service doesn’t mean your bidders do. In fact, according to a GAO report, 21% of US households don’t even have access to cable or DSL. So think about that next time you upload a massive file. Set your camera to “image size: small” or resize the image in your photo editing software. If this confuses you, I suggest you stick with eBay’s image hosting service. They automatically resize any images you upload to no larger than 400 x 300 pixels.
- Cropping Sometimes all an auction picture needs is a quick crop to help the item being sold be the center of the potential bidder’s attention. Need some software to help you do this? Download Google’s Picasa for a free and easy to use image editing application. A crop would help the image below. At least the sink isn’t full of dirty dishes!
- Lack of Close Up Unless the auction is for the cardboard box background, I the picture below speaks for itself. Zoom-in, step closer, or crop the image so the item being sold fills most of the frame.
- Stock Photos Stock photos are fine if you are selling new items. However, when you are selling used items, a stock photo could mislead the consumer as to the condition of the product. Auctions involve a significant amount of trust on the bidders part. Pictures are one way of developing that trust. Providing accurate pictures helps the bidder determine if your definition of mint condition matches their definition.
- Poor Lighting If an image is too dark or too light, the buyer is going to have some difficulty making out the details of the photograph. Image editing software will be able to help with some exposure issues, but your best bet is to get the lighting correct when you take the picture.
So here’s the moral of this story, if you aren’t putting much effort into taking and posting good eBay pictures, bidders aren’t putting much effort into looking at them.
Apr
14
eBay Reserve Auctions Revisited
Filed Under Sellers' Insights | Leave a Comment
This is Part II of our analysis of the utility of reserve auctions. Read Part I of our Reserve Auction Series
A while back I posted an article that summarized a university economics study that concluded reserve auctions produced less revenue than regular auctions. Today I’ll discuss a study that concludes the opposite - namely that reserve auctions generate higher revenue. The discrepancy between the two studies might lead some to confusion, but actually the different conclusions provide important insights into when auction sellers should employ a reserve price and when they should avoid it.
A reserve auction listing is one in which an eBay seller opts to set a secret minimum price. If the auction does not produce a bid that exceeds this reserve price, the auction does not result in a sale.
The study, “Pennies from eBay: The Determinants of Price on Online Auctions,” analyzed the data associated with over 20,000 listings of collectible U.S. pennies auction on eBay during two months during the summer of 1999. The average price these pennies sold for was $173.20 and the price range spanned from $4.99 to $3,500.00US.
When controlling for the other factors that influence the closing prices of eBay listings, the studies authors found that the “presence of a reserve price increases the auction price by about 15% on average, and the effect is statistically significant.”
So we have two studies analyzing the effects reserve prices that draw opposite conclusions regarding the benefits of this online auction tactic to sellers. While it is easy to conclude these studies are of little utility because they contradict each other, this is not necessarily the case. The first paper’s sample was strictly limited to inexpensive items - specifically Pokemon trading cards selling for less than $25.00. The second study focused on collectible pennies which had an average sale price of nearly $200.00.
Therefore, we can conclude that employing eBay reserve prices for inexpensive goods results in reduced income for sellers while reserve auctions increase revenue for more expensive items.
The study, “Pennies from eBay: The Determinants of Price in Online Auctions,” was published in January 2000 by David Lucking-Reiley, Doug Bryan and Daniel Reeves of Vanderbilt University.
Apr
8
One Way To Increase Your Shipping & Handling DSR
Filed Under Feedback, Sellers' Insights | Leave a Comment
I recently ordered a book off of Half.com and, being both frugal and patient, I opted for the Media Mail shipping method. I was delighted when the book arrived just a few days later in a flat-rate Priority Mail box.
Value is defined as the difference between what a customer paid and the perceived worth of what a customer receives. I paid for Media Mail shipping and received Priority Mail service, so, for me, the value of the book increased substantially. Now, the book I ordered was a 1500 page text, and pretty hefty, so it might not have been a significant difference between the cost to mail it Media or Flat-rate priority. But that’s not what I focused on…
…My focus was diverted to the value I received by a clever note written by the seller on the packing slip:
