Selling on eBay

Well, this is the forum to rant in, so…

Bid retractions are super frustrating as a seller. :angry:

That’s about it. Just needed to vent that out there a little bit.

Have a good night everyone.

The only thing worse is wanting to back out after winning.

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Yeah I could see that sucking pretty bad too.

Yeah i know the feeling. It sucks eBay doesn’t do much about it. Even worse with winning bidders that don’t end up paying.

I can’t imagine anything worse than a buyer’s remorse…

How about when you list an auction and the item sells for only about 10% of the market value?

IMO that’s worse than buyers remorse, at least with buyers remorse you can just relist it.
But with this you have to let it go knowing you could’ve gotten way more for it…

Don’t do auctions starting at 1$. Ever. Do BIN’s or start auctions off at a desired price.

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When I have an item that sits for awhile and I dont really want to go any lower on it. I’ll throw it up for auction starting at .99

It was worked very very well for me. It brings people in, seeing a $150 item at .99

Also ive had items that have ended up going to auction and selling for MORE than the BIN price I had it up for a month ago.

So Doing auctions at $1 has worked out for me i’d say 9 times out of 10. Plus you move the item quicker than having it sit at a BIN.

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This. Sometimes items just sit, even at a fantastic price. List a bunch of auctions at $0.99, not only do you get the exposure, but it seems to hit close to market value each time. I don’t do this for expensive items, but for $25-$100 it works well.

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These experiences and opinions are good for me. Thanks guys! I’m just starting selling cards on eBay and it seems that peoples’ preferred tactics vary. Good to know some pros and cons of each.

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Low starting auction are the only way to do auction. If you’re going to start an auction close to market value why do an auction at all? Just do a BIN.

I’m not going too much into eBays metrics, if you start an auction at low value you’ll get more watchers and page views in the beginning. This leads to higher search rankings which leads to more views/watchers which cycles itself. The ultimate goal of an auction is to get views from the people that will bid the highest, which is best achieved by more views. That’s why low starting auctions on average perform better then auctions that start near market price. It’s also why most of the major sellers start their auctions at $.99.

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Agreed. Obviously there’s the odd item that will sell for quite less than a seller expects but overall $0.99 usually do quite good.

The worst is people that start an auction quite high and dare to put a RESERVE on top of it.

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As long as the item is an in-demand item, I have never had a problem with a $.99 starting price.

I listed a sealed 1st edition Team Rocket box BIN at $1000 that was up for a few days.

I got impatient because I needed the money, decided to list it at $.99 and it ended up selling for $1150. $150 more than my BIN price!

On the other hand, I listed a played WOTC holo that is valued around $10 (don’t remember which card it was) and it only got one bid so I basically had to give it to the buyer for free.

Know the market i guess!

Also, on bid retraction: I only really find it annoying if they bid and then retract after a couple days. If someone bids and then retracts a couple hours later (as long as there is at least a day left) I really don’t care, or even notice.

As Gary said, by far the most annoying is buyers that don’t pay. No, NO… WHAT’S EVEN WORSE:

When the buyer doesn’t pay and they don’t respond to any messages. It’s like wtf, at least tell me you aren’t going to buy it.

I find this problem is ridiculously common with YuGiOh products, not as much with pokemon.

This forum can be hilarious sometimes. :stuck_out_tongue: Just a month back the topic of BIN’s VS Auctions came up, and almost everyone universally agreed on BIN’s. And now it’s the complete opposite, heh.

BIN > Auction that start at .99 > Auction that start near market price

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I just had a bunch of 10-day 0.99 auctions end and ended up getting 40-50% less than market value on every single one of them. Not sure exactly what I did wrong, but it must have been something.

You have to let auctions end on Sunday Evening to get best results. Still, BIN’s are better.

lol I’ve been wanted to ask this for a while now and your post reminded me. Day of the week/time. Is ending auctions Sunday evening actually the best for activity? Or does anyone else have a contrary opinion?

They did end on Sunday evening, at 6pm Pacific.