The eBay curse
eBay can be a lot of fun, but I usually avoid auctions when it comes to my bookselling business. I just like to set my price and be done with it. If I had a ton of collectibles it might be different.So it's Buy-it-Now on eBay (or Amazon) for me. I just hate to mess around with the buyers who want something for an unrealistically low price.
Of course the other side of the coin is when the auction buyer pays an unrealistically high price. An interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor finds that many auction bidders end up paying more than they could have bought the item for using Buy-it-Now.
This is where eBay users fell prey to what Malmendier and her coauthor, Stanford University economist Hanh Lee, call "bidder's curse." Apparently, some bidders grew so enthusiastic about winning the auction that they lost sight of the "buy it now" price, sometimes offering more than $185.
We found that in 43 percent of the auctions the bidders ended up paying more than the 'Buy-it-Now' price," Malmendier says. This is really huge. It's far more than I could have expected
Labels: bookselling, collectible books, eBay
posted by Steve Weber at 7/16/2007
5 Comments:
I set up my auctions to end at 6PM Pacific standard Sunday, which is 9 PM EST. I believe that most people in the USA are probably home at this time. I have found that my auctions have done the best with this ending time.
I still put up a few things for auction. Generally, it's the stuff I buy at little cost. Occassionally, I get a nice surprise, as people bid much more than they would have to pay for the book elsewhere. This also helps me identify hot topics, which of course change regularly. I don't list anything at auction that will hurt to sell for 99cents.
Sometimes I make an extra sale when folks browse through my ebay store.
My two cents' worth.... Best closing time depends upon the type and price of the book. For popular fiction ("penny books") the reader wants it and wants it now, so I set a three-day auction period and let it close whenever. For a one-of-a-kind item, the longer time period and carefully-selected closing times are more appropriate.
"Penny books" are used to draw traffic to my eBay store site, hoping thus to snag additional sales once the buyer is there. Seems to work: active penny book auctions double the overall hit rates. Just make sure you auction only the penny books that are in high demand (use "Marketplace Research" to determine which ones are) and set your S&H fees to cover costs.
I used to list one book as an auction listing, one that would get a lot of traffic, and then manually cross-promote my store books that related to the same topic as the auction listing book. I was away from Ebay for a few months, and now that I am back, the cross-promote function has been deleted as far as the seller being able to manually add items. This is somehow called a "new feature", marketing tools. Has anyone figured out a good way to still use the cross-promotion?
We've had an eBay store going for a while with limited success. Started putting up 3 auctions a day of cheaper books but it drew folks to the shop and bingo, more store sales. Only problem is the auctioned books tend to sell at 50% of what I list them for on other sites. Always a dilemma - 50% less today or full price tomorrow (maybe)
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