Smart Tips to Setting an Auction Timeframe to Maximize Your eBay Profits
In previous posts I’ve discussed how to optimize your auctions, choose the right category, create a pricing strategy and how to use 3-day auctions to your advantage to attract the highest number of bidders. But you shouldn’t discount seven and ten day auctions either.
There are certain products that really do sell better on weekdays. You can also use 7 and 10 day auctions to get much more exposure for your products than you would on the weekends. Here are a few ways you can get the longer-lasting auctions to work to your advantage.
Seven day auctions are good for selling products that are basically weekly products. When I speak about weekly products, there are a lot of publications and media that’s out there that people get weekly.
For me the vast majority of the auctions that I use are ten day auctions. Why do I like ten day auctions? Well for one thing ten day auctions are really the largest amount of exposure time you can get. With a ten day auction I’ve had products that will get almost 1,000 to 1,500 views; in other words I will have 1,000 to 1,500 viewers looking at the product.
That is a lot of exposure. So ten day auctions tend to be a lot better to use as opposed to seven day auctions. Now as you know I made mention of the benefits of a three day auction but here’s some critical success factors as to why you should use a ten day auction.
First, a ten day auction gives you the most amount of exposure for your product to the biggest audience. If you run a ten day auction the chances of selling your product at a predetermined price or a price on an open auction is much greater for obtaining a higher price. That is the true benefit of a ten day auction.
A second benefit of a ten day auction is, depending on what day of the week you want the auction to end you can rotate auction start times to ensure that if you’re selling products through Dutch auctions, multiple listing auctions, that you’re going to increase sales of the same item over and over again.
If you look at my ten day auctions on line, you’ll notice that I try to start my ten day auctions on Thursday nights because I want my auctions to end on Sunday night. Why is that so? Well, as you know, earlier I made mention of the fact that your biggest window of viewing opportunities for potential buyers is on the weekend, so that’s a big thing for me is to make sure that I run ten day auctions for products that list in what we call Dutch auctions.
And I’ll certainly expand on that for you. What is a Dutch auction? Well a Dutch auction is an auction where you have the same product available in multiple quantities.
As you know I’m a published book author and I sell books in quantity. So I can put one auction up and have an unlimited number of books through that one auction.
So for me its really important that I try to get as much exposure for the book as I possibly can. Now when were talking about profit optimization, I can go out and list my product online at a lower price than what I sell but I’m not really concerned about volumes of customers.
I list prices that are very competitive but I don’t give away my product because there’s value in what I sell and there’s value in consumers paying for what they get and I want to make sure the consumer gets certainly a good purchase from the products that I sell.
Mike Perry, along with Tim Black are the authors of “eBay Trade Secrets Revealed ”
Mike and Tim help business owners and corporations build business models that leverage the eBay brand.
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I’m also a seller of books but I have never used a ten day auction. Should also try Amazon for selling books. Smart tip indeed. Thanks!