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How to decide whether to use a regular auction, dutch auction and/or Buy It Now

(Posted September, 2003):

This article is submitted by Mike Enos, author of a great newsletter devoted to eBay auction topics, you should really consider joining his mailing list, the information is at the bottom.

Q. How do you decide whether to use a regular auction, Dutch auction and/or BUY IT NOW?

A. This is definitely an experience situation. It depends mostly on:

• What are you selling ?
• How many of them do you have to sell?
• How soon do you need to move them?
• How "HOT" is the item?

Here are the "rules" that I follow:

- If I have a unique item that I only have one of, I run a regular auction WITHOUT Buy It Now (BIN) for 7 days if I can see others recently sold, or 10 days if I can't see any recent sold history which probably means it is hard to find.

- If I have an item that I repeatedly sell and have a continuing supply, I run BOTH Dutch and regular auctions. I stagger them throughout the day

(I live on the East coast so times below are EST)

10:45am - Qty 1. Regular auction with Buy It Now

03:30pm - Qty 3. Dutch auction

07:35pm - Qty 1. Regular auction with Buy It Now

11:00pm - Qty 3. Dutch auction

Why????? Because some people hate waiting and bidding and will use BIN, while others feel comfortable that they can put in a minimum bid and will get their item in the Dutch format.

Space out the auctions evenly, alternating between the formats. (ie Reg/Dutch/Reg/Dutch..)

If you are consistently selling out (or almost) then consider adding another auction. If I were to add to the above schedule, I would try adding a midnight auction (which is only 9pm on the West Coast), or try a combo of 9:30am / 12:30 / 3:30 / 6:30 / 9:30 / 11:30. You always want one of your auctions to appear in the front page, (By having it close soon)

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Note! Remember that eBay doesn't like you to have more than 10 IDENTICAL auctions running simultaneously. So be careful!

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HOW TO FIGURE DUTCH LEVELS

I seldom see (or expect) a bidding war to take place in a Dutch auction. For most sellers, the purpose of this format is to sell a bunch of items FAST. My purpose is to sell CONSISTENTLY! I may have 100 identical items to sell, but I don't expect that if I ran a Dutch Qty 100 auction that I would sell them all. Why? Unless you have an INCREDIBILY hot item, I don't see that happening

(Please email me with examples if I'm wrong :-)

Thinking as a BUYER, if I see a Dutch auction with a 99 qty, I'll think "Ahhh.. I can buy this anytime." If I see a qty of 3, I'll think "Oooh.. better buy now sounds like they are almost all gone!".

So, I tend to keep my dutch qty as low as possible. To me, Dutch qty=2 doesn't make sense, so qty=3 is a the minimum I do. Keep your qty 0-2 below your # of bids.

For example: You list qty=3, and get...

4 bids = Keep it at 3.

5 bids = Keep it at 3.

6 bids = Up it to 4.

7 bids = Up it to 5.

To succeed in eBay, you need to be concerned with MANY small victories, not a few "big scores". "Big scores" are gravy, while consistent average sales are your bread and butter.

The name of the game is a consistent stream of sales!

Mike Enos

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