What is the best Duration for an eBay Auction?
On eBay you run your auction for a specific duration. Currently,the options are 1, 3, 5, 7 or 10 days.
But which duration is best for your auction?
In this article, Ill give you some pointers designed to assistin answering the question.
You might wonder why you would ever wish to have less than themaximum exposure i.e. 10 days? Surely running your auction forthe longest time would give bidders more opportunity, andtherefore a higher sale price would result? Certainly eBay.comwould appear to think so, as they currently charge a fee of$0.20 for the privilege of operating a 10 day auction.
However, if you have a very popular item or if you have manyidentical items to sell, it may pay you to have a shorterauction duration. Also, it pays to consider the end point ofyour auction very carefully. In addition, if you are running aFixed Price auction, theres a little trick you can employ togive you extra exposure.
So, lets review the elements to consider in the setting of yourauction duration.
a) Start/end day of auction
In my experience, for most categories, the weekend is by far thebusiest viewing period on eBay. I would estimate that around 50%of views of my auctions take place on Saturday and Sunday. Insetting auction duration, therefore, the weekend peak could beimportant to your success.
If you can arrange to end an auction on Sunday night, you getthe benefit of those who wait until the end of the auction tobid, plus the enhanced viewing traffic numbers which appearduring the weekend.
This means if youre posting an auction on Tuesday night, a 5day auction could be good.
Having said that the weekend is the busiest for most categories,some could benefit from a midweek closing date. Items in thiscategory would include those in which goods are offered forbusiness users. If your item is targeted at businesses, you wantpeople to bid for your item while they are at work. In theseinstances, make sure your auction covers working days, andconcludes during work time. It has also been found that officeequipment and supplies sell well in the morning.
Be conscious of the time when you post your auction, as this isthe exact time it will finish a number of days ahead. Therespotentially a great deal of difference between an auctionclosing at 10 oclock on Sunday night, and 10 oclock on Sundaymorning. If you can pitch your auction to be the former, youcould benefit significantly from those extra weekend viewers.(Note the section on Time Zones later.)
b) Known popularity of the item
If you know your item is very popular, and your past experienceshows that you will always sell at or more than the price youwant, even outside of normal peak periods, then a 1 or 3 dayauction could be appropriate. The benefit of a 1 or 3 day saleis that you can sell more items, more quickly.
c) Awareness of eBay sort facilities after searching
Whenever eBays search is used by an eBayer, the default is thatit returns auction titles in the order of how long auctions haveleft to run. Auctions which have minutes, or seconds to run,will appear first in the returned list. Auctions which have 9+days to run will be at the end. And the list may run to many,many pages.
Experience has shown that eBayers tend to look only at one ortwo pages in returned lists. This means it is important you getyour auction onto these first two pages at some point in itslife – another reason why a 1 or 3 day auction might be betterthan a 7 or 10 day duration.
Be aware too that a high proportion of bidding activity takesplace towards the end of an auction. This is natural. Buyers areon the lookout for bargains. If they can nip in with a bid atthe end of the auction, they might get the item at a good priceand there may not be time for others to top their bid. (Buyerscan also use “sniping” software, designed to place a bid at thelatest possible time on auctions which are of interest to them.)
However, the searcher can easily re-order the returned titleslist. A popular option is to re-order the list into “newlylisted” sequence. The top of the list will now show auctionswhich have been newly added to eBay. This is why there issometimes a blip of bidding activity at the beginning of anauction as well as at the end.
d) Time Zones
eBays default is to
commence your auction from the time yousubmit it. As you know, this means it will terminate at thatexact time, the number of days ahead that you select as theduration. However, if youre offering your item internationallyyou should give consideration to the time zone youre aiming forin terms of auction finish point.
For example, in the USA half of all eBay members reside in theEastern Time Zone. So an auction ending at 10pm Pacific Time isfine for west coast eBay members, but over on the east coastthis is 1am! So youre effectively losing around 50% ofpotential bidders at a critical point in your auction.
eBay does provide an option whereby you can schedule yourauction to commence at a specific time (and on another day). Infact you can set your auction to start at any time and day up to21 days ahead. This means you can commence your auctionaccording to the timing you believe will attract the mostviewers. There is a small fee for using this feature.
This is a useful capability if you want to create your listingsin advance, and then have them released onto eBay in a phasedsequence.
e) Fixed Price auctions – Single Item
I mentioned a little trick earlier. Well, here it is. With aFixed Price auction for a single item you could considermanaging your auction duration dynamically. You need to bemonitoring your auctions closely i.e. throughout the day, toundertake this technique.
When bidders do a search on eBay, you know the auctions with theleast amount of time left appear at the top of the returnedlist. So it is advantageous to keep the remaining time on yourauction as short as possible. This is a way in which you getfour bites of that cherry for a single listing fee.
1. Start your Fixed Price single item auction off with 1 dayduration. Wait for someone to buy.
2. When the auction has just over 12 hours left, go in to theauction and revise the auction duration to 3 days. Yes, you cando this – as long as there is at least 12 hours left. Wait forsomeone to buy.
3. When the auction has just over 12 hours left, go in to theauction and revise the auction duration to 5 days. Wait forsomeone to buy.
4. When the auction has just over 12 hours left, go in to theauction and revise the auction duration to 7 days. Wait forsomeone to buy.
5. When the auction has just over 12 hours left, go in to theauction and revise the auction duration to 10 days. (Dontforget this will cost you a small fee on eBay.com) Wait forsomeone to buy.
6. The auction concludes naturally.
This might look complicated, but it isnt really once you getthe hang of it. Of course, at any point during the above processsomeone could buy your item and your auction closesautomatically. If you have another of the same or similar itemto sell, you can re-list it.
f) Fixed Price auctions – Multiple Items
With a Fixed Price auction for multiple items, I would recommendyou set the auction duration to the maximum – 10 days, or 7 daysif youre not prepared to absorb the extra fee on eBay.com.
When you have multiple items it is not advisable to use the ploydescribed above for Fixed Price single item auctions. This isbecause as soon as you receive a bid (in this case it would be aFixed Price sale), you are unable to modify the auction durationeven though you may have many of the multiple items still tosell.
If you sell all your items within your chosen 7 or 10 days, thenthe auction closes automatically anyway.
g) Value Based Formula
If you are happier using a value based formula in setting yourauction duration, here is my rule of thumb for items that I havenot tried to sell before:
Min Bid amountsSet auction duration to
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