eBay Auction Starting and Ending Day Strategies

It's usually when auctions are about to end that they get
half their bids ' sometimes that's when they get their only
bids. If you want your item to sell for a good price, then,
it makes no sense to let it finish on a day and time when
no-one's going to be around to place bids or buy.

Selling to Business consumers.

If you're selling business equipment and have mostly
business customers, you should really aim to have your
auctions finishing between 9am and 5pm on weekdays. It is
worth, however, trying to avoid mornings and avoiding the
'lead-in' and 'lead-out' that takes place on Monday and
Friday themselves.

Selling to Home consumers.

If most of your sales are to private customers having it
shipped to their own home, then you want your auctions to
finish when these kind of customers will be around.
Unfortunately, these times are the opposite of what they are
for the business customers. The ideal time to catch a home
customer is on a Sunday evening.

Listing Durations.

In order to get your listings to end on a particular day,
you can simply change the duration of your auctions
depending on what day it is. For example, if you mostly sell
to home consumers and the day today is Thursday, then your
auction needs to run for either 3 or 10 days to hit a
Sunday. If you sell more to business and the day today is
Friday, then:

a 1 day auction would not be good (finishing on Saturday and
no-one will be around to buy or bid), 3 days would be
alright (Monday), 5 days would be good (Wednesday), 7 days
would be good (another Friday), and 10 days would be good as
well (Monday again).

You could draw up a little timetable of when you should and
shouldn't be listing depending on the days of the week '
make it red, amber and green, traffic light style, and stick
it on your wall. You'll want to experiment to find what day
is the best day to end an auction, or you can use a variety
of web-based research tools to determine what day and what
auction duration is best for you product.

Scheduled Listings.

Of course, if that all sounds like too much trouble then
there is an easier ' if slightly more expensive ' way of
doing things. Simply use any of the many tools that let you
schedule listings (almost all listing programs and sites do)
' you can set the start date for any day and time you feel
like.

Be aware that you will have to pay a few cents per listing
for this if you do it through eBay. With some software, you
may also need to leave your computer on all the time, so the
software can start the auctions when it's supposed to. The
advantage of this method, however, is that there will be no
per-listing fee, since the auctions were scheduled through
your computer and not through eBay. Check out Turbolister
2.0. It is free from eBay. You can create as many
auctions as you want and Turbolister will calculate listing
fees and upload all the auctions you want all at the same
time.

Also consider that listing durations can be used to generate
a sense of urgency, especially with sought after items.
This can appeal to the impulse buyer and urge then to bid
now rather than wait. Sometimes a 1 or 3 day auction works
best.

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Allen Owen is an enthusiastic home business entrepreneur and
engineer. Have a look at his eBay tips e-zine:
http://www.thedigitalresevoir.com