[sdiy] OT : Ebay

[jbv]

> >And ebay now charges a premium if you make your auctions 10
> >days... so he paid extra for no good reason.
> > >
>
> yeh, 10 day auction is a bit of a time waster I feel.. the lengthy amt of
> time discourages early bids, early bids often encourage further bids, and by
> the time it comes close to close, often forgotten.. I'be noted at any rate
> that things go much better on 7 day..
> Cheers,
> Dan

Indeed, even for very rare and most sought after items, the extra
exposure time offered by a 10 days auction doesn't pay off, mostly
because these days most ppl looking for a specific item have their
Personal Shopper (or other software tools) configured to warn them
via email as soon as a copy  is auctioned.
Furthermore, for categories with more than a couple hundreds of
items listed, I noticed that bidders tend to browse only the "new today"
and "ending today" sections.

After almost 2 years of selling at eBay, I actually reduced the length
of my auctions from 7 to 5 days, and have the feeling that final prices
go higher than before (may be because the thrill doesn't fade away...)

If you buy, here are a couple of advices based on experience :

- ALWAYS check seller's feedback profile before bidding : you can
learn a lot from it. A well established (above 100, without any neutral
nor negative comments) feedback means : bid with confidence. Simply
because for the seller, taking the risk of trashing such high reputation
isn't worth the $$$ he'll make by cheating 1 bidder on a specific item.

- for items without a pic, ALWAYS ask the seller questions about it
before bidding. The way your questions will be answered will tell you
a lot about the amount of trust you can put in that seller...
And I even dare to say that a seller with high feedback profile doesn't
need to post any pic : an accurate description of the item condition is
enough. Another reason is that so often, pics are just low quality
scans of polaroids, and they don't tell much... In that case, a clean scan
of a pic from a brochure might be more useful...


And if you sell,

- make at least 1 online payment method available in your auctions :
it will really boost your sales, more than you can expect.

- accept overseas bidders : so many times I found interesting lots of
electronic parts on eBay, but sellers were shipping to USA only...

JB