Selling Items Successfully Using Auction Sites
There are many, no, thousands of flea markets that dot the landscape of the American Saturday morning event calendar. As fall rolls into full splendor with brilliant leaves changing colors and tumbling down onto not so green lawns, even the most casual of buyers can’t help but notice the handwritten signs beckoning prospective customers to flea markets wherever a parking lot of any size exists. And yet, the most successful flea market vendor knows that correctly interpreting the prospective customer’s body language is a major help in being able to complete sales. Now what does this have to do with auctions? Well, in some sense, just as the flea market vendor senses the limits of the buyer’s “willingness to spend” when it comes to pricing items, so an auctioneer reads the “bids” on an item and gleans information about what price to use to entice bidders to bid on their products.
The eBay® vendors who make lots of sales in auctioning businesses have learned a few basics as they present their products for online auction. These basics are not hard to understand but because of the simplicity, some do not follow these tips and end up with a lot of unsold goods. Rather than just creating a delay in contributing the items to the local charity or even worse, the local dump, let’s investigate what it takes to sell successfully on auction sites such as eBay®.
What are some basic tips to be followed? First, survey the landscape by checking out what is selling on your favorite auction site. There is simply no use in trying to sell dress shoes to an audience primarily interested in hiking boots. Look for sites that host the kind of product that you are trying to sell. Do searches on the sites and compare what the asking prices are for the kind of goods you are trying to price. Then pick a starting price that would entice you to “make and offer.” If the price is too low, your prospective customer will be suspicious of the quality and/or the source of the item. If the price is too high, no one will even click on the item to see what its qualities, much less make a bid.
Next, present a picture with a short but helpful description of the item and why it is a good buy. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words, but a few words won’t hurt. Finally, look at the average time it has taken to sell the item on a site like eBay® during the “season” that such items sell, and set your bidding time for a reasonable response time. These starting tips should help with your initial setup on an auction site and the incoming starting bids will give you an idea as to whether you have hit the mark with your prospective bidders based on their responses. Let those bids give you a feel for how close you are coming to your bidder’s desire to purchase. You can also try just providing a price that you will accept without a bid. This is also another popular strategy on a site like eBay®. To increase interest in your sales you might also try blogging about your auctions to bring in more customers. In any case, experiment until you get the hang of using these sites and soon you too will be an old pro when it comes to successfully selling on auction sites.
