50% off 1 & 3 day auctions on eBay.com

No primary category set

eBay.com are (between the 3rd and 31st). The discount applies regardless of start price and is also carried over to eBay Canada

There are a few restrictions, sellers must have DSRs of 4.5 and above (or be new sellers yet to gain DSR ratings) and some categories (including Media, Motors, Real Estate and Business and Industrial categories) are excluded.

There have been many incentives to list long duration fixed price multiple quantity listings on eBay recently, so it’s interesting to see a promotion aimed at the exact opposite behaviour.

This promotion is likely to fill the site with items ending soonest (which will climb to the top of search results), doubtless many of which will be listed at prices close to the desired final sale price.

Auctions are a selling tactic well worth pursuing, if you sell on eBay.com and routinely list fixed price items only I’d recommend trying some auctions.

19 Responses

  1. I am guessing the End Game of eBay is to do away with longer duration auctions, which lets face it are pretty dull.

    The most obvious looser in this promotion are the sellers of collectables (not mentioned above) who’s products are probably best suited to auctions. I wonder why that might be.

  2. I dunno about that Whirly – don’t forget one day auctions are actually restricted for a lot of products to allow time for fraud checks. Also in the US 10 day auctions cost more anyway.

    I reckon eBay.com just want to boost sales as much as possible in what’s often a slow month and auctions are the only way left to do that. By making them short auctions there’ll be that much more product ending soonest for buyers to bid on.

  3. maybe they dont need to loose money to boost auctions in collectables because as you say auctions are the natural format for collectables,
    many buyers of collectables are auction savvy, they use and understand auctions in the real world,
    they are not shopping mall style, fixed price, hiked up, to discoun, brainwashed, buy now, pay in the next life, with cash back ,

    plus ebay are not so daft as they look,

    starting an item at a high price for a collectable is the kiss of death ,
    so encouraging a higher start price by fee discounting
    is counter productive

  4. You reckon wrong Chris. This is part of ebay’s effort to make 1 or 3 days the new standard auction length. Watch for the fee increases on “standard” 7 day auctions. They really are dumb as bricks in San Jose to do this stuff while Rome burns.

  5. #2 It’s gonna be a slow year if no bugger can find anything 😆

    Norf, exactly, eBay no damm well that collectables sellers will pay full whack because BIN’s just don’t work effectively.

  6. ebay listing fees are the best deal on this planet or any other planet for listing collectables I dont mind the listing fees at all .they could double the listing fee and it would not worry us

  7. I dont think collectables sellers are losing on this deal
    they wont be clogged up and competing with trillions of one and three day listings

  8. I’m with North, short auctions aren’t the answer for collectables or rare products. Short duration auctions are ideal for fast moving products with mass appeal.

  9. #8 eBay don’t want collectables do they? thought the end game was to turn eBay into a shopping camparison/comodity site, they just want the daft auctions for daft items that generate some media interest,, like a 2nd hand snot rag some bird has stuck her hooter in.

  10. well we sell antiques and collectables and we list 99% fixed price, we find that auctions generally don’t work from a business point of view (for us)

  11. JR
    lots of folk in the antique trade we deal with. only list fixed price or start their auctions at a price to protect their cost
    what ever works is the best way to do things,

    at one time we never ever considered listing anything other than at a 99p start

    but we have had to reconsider our ways after taking quite a hit a time or two.
    ebay is not the same these days, we blame it on search

  12. We list things in the following order:

    a) just below the price we expect to get (auction)
    if that doesn’t sell
    b) Fixed Price (higher than price we expect to get with Best Offer)
    if that doesn’t sell
    c) auction at a low start.

    If none of these work, then we rest for a bit, or stick back into another land auction to shift it off the shelves. Obviously the last is not really desirable as we often only get what we paid for it (wholesale price equivalent), but it releases cash to buy something else that might make more money.

    Not an exact science antiques and collectables more an art form..:) .it depends very much on who is looking on the day, more so than other spheres I believe.

  13. auction at a low start and let the devil take the hindmost is our MO
    if that dont work then tarra ebay is our attitude

  14. and think vanilla

    keep it simple and uncluttered
    bollocks to the flash templates , shooting stars, powersellers, and all that tripe,
    we are in it for dosh, not the glory,

  15. While I think that Northumbrian is right in his reasoning for collectables not being included in this promotion (ie: the collectibles market probably works ideally on 7 day auctions), he also says “plus ebay are not so daft as they look”.

    It would appear that they are daft when it comes to thinking through the implications on more than one category set, as Antiques, which are precisely the same type of market are included in this promotion.

    =====
    As for the suggestion that this is not a precursor to fee changes to “encourage” shorter auction times, it may be worth noting that Ebay.com, had a one day half price sale for 1,3 and 5 day auctions on December 10th (collectables were included in that one, but machinery, which also functions better on 7 day auctions, were not). This is reminiscent of the precursor to free gallery, first on Ebay.com, then on Ebay.uk – start with a short promotion to feel it out, then have a longer promotion with a duration of a month or more to see how it affects the site overall in the longer term. If EBAY sees this as successful, watch for a change in 1 and 3 day auction fees in about April or so, and likely a related promotion that buyers now want shorter auctions.

    My own view about online auctions, is that 7 days is about the optimum length. It allows competition to gather pace, and suitable exposure. I know a number of people who search Ebay (generally for collectables) on one specific evening a week. The shorter the auction, the less likely those searchers are to even see it, let alone bid. The ten day auction, on the other hand, just drags on too long, and bidders can lose interest and decide not to bid (I say this in spite of the fact that I stagger ten day auctions over the Christmas / New Year holidays, in order to effectively get the equivalent of 7 days of exposure).

    Finally as I said on another forum: “While this will not help sell through rates (clearance percentages), it should be remembered that someone dumb enough to try listing a single day auction three times without sales, has paid fifty percent MORE in listing fees than if they listed the same item for a full 7 day auction. Can Ebay find anyone dumb enough to boost their bottom line in such a way?”

    Ebay has lost interest in clearance rates, in my opinion. However if they can encourage more sellers to list for shorter durations though, they can look at getting a quicker turnover of fees. This is likely to clog up some searches with items ending today, if they are going to save the sales of genuine sellers with longer listings, one change that NEEDS to be made is to add page numbers for search (a) above the listings, and (b) place the page numbers at the bottom of the page above the “sponsored links”. Too many casual users do not realise/remember that there is more than one page of search or category results, and are encouraged to click an off-site link before they finish browsing their search results. This is a serious flaw in page design, that must affect some sales adversely.

    Kevin

  16. Quite a sad “promotion” from what for years had been no restriction 5 or 10 cent day after xmas. Look likes they’ve axed the Canada only promos(along with half the staff here) we’ve had once a month for a couple of years, none since Oct.

    They also quietly a couple of months ago changed how the relist credit works.
    While the help file always said you got the credit for relisting within 60 days, its always worked as long as the original listing was on the site. No more, they only work for 60 days now, changed just before the demise of 5 and 10 cent days in favour of half price days so we couldn’t use relists from the last 5 day during the xmas season.

  17. When will there be an Ebay class action lawsuit about shipping DSR system? Specifically, the shipping time DSR, it is inherently unfair to them but especially when it comes to Cross Border Trade. Specifically, it is unfair for a buyer to rate them on how long it takes a carrier to deliver a package. But it’s not just delivery delays; it’s customs, unreasonable buyer expectations (which we must better manage, by the way), higher shipping costs and the inherent pitfalls of language differences and mistranslations that create a real illegal point for sellers regarding this particular DSR.

  18. Auctions on the new eBay scare me. I used to sell nothing except auctions but slowly moved to fixed price over the past few years. Last time I listed an auction was in March and my item was buried around page 17 in best match and it sold for about 60% of its typical price. A quick search revealed that about half the sellers were actually losing money on that same item. I put it in fixed price and got the sale price I was expecting. Before defaulting to best match the auction format for that item was fine. Plus in many categories auctions are more expensive in regards to FVF. And no more worrying about having a quarter of our listings ending with NPBs with fixed price.

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