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)
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