Below, you'll find extensive information on leading
ebay car auction articles and products to help you on your way
to success.
How To Stop Ebay Auction Sniping. By Kirsten Hawkins Every day, hapless bidders get beaten to the punch by auction snipers who jump in at the last minute. I know how annoying it can be, as I once had it happen to me three times in a row on the same item! The thing is that the only people who can help the poor bidders are us, the sellers.
The Problem.
Bidders will bid on an item and then wait for days until it finishes, only to have someone else outbid them at the last minute. In a traditional auction at a real auction house, this isn't a problem at all, as the auction keeps going until everyone has bid as much as they want to, and the auctioneer double-checks with the classic phrase "going, going, gone".
The problem on eBay is caused by the fixed length of time that eBay's auctions last, and the fact that they aren't extended significantly if someone places a new bid in the last few seconds of the auction. Imagine if a real auction house worked that way, letting people shout "50 cents more!" at the last second and win an item. It would simply be unfair, and many buyers think it's unfair on eBay too.
The Solutions.
Until eBay decide to fix the problem (and by now it's looking unlikely that they ever will), you're the only one who can do anything for your buyers.
First off, you can encourage your buyers to use eBay's proxy bidding system the way it was intended. The idea of the system is that they enter the maximum they're willing to pay for an item and eBay places bids for them automatically up to that maximum. They're not supposed to come back and bid an extra dollar every time they get outbid.
If your bidders are bidding high enough, then no sniper will even come along and beat them - because they will have set the maximum snipe level in their sniping software to less than the normal bidder's maximum. Changing the way people use eBay is hard, though.
One
alternative is to keep an eye on who's bidding on your auction, and cancel bids from known snipers - but this requires you to be around right at the end of the auction to cancel their bids. You might also want to set your auction to end sometime when bidders will be around so that they can outbid snipers themselves. This is good business sense anyway - most of the bidding always takes place in the last few hours of an auction.
An easier way to thwart bid snipers is to offer 'Second Chance' sales to bidders who get outbid by a sniper at the last minute. This is good for you, and for them - they still get to buy the item they wanted, and you've just made two sales: one to the sniper and one to them.
Once you've sold your items, though, you might be upset to find that one of them gets returned for a refund. Our next email will show you how to turn these returns into profits!
Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.
We strive to provide only quality articles, so if there
is a specific topic related to car auction that you
would like us to cover, please contact us at any time.
And again, thank you to those contributing daily to our ebay car auction website.
Should you take a fixed or variable/tracker mortgage deal?
It's one of the most important questions that borrowers face when taking out a new mortgage. Mortgage Introducer recently reported that three in four new UK mortgages in December 2011 were arranged on a fixed-rate basis - up almost fiv...
1 recipients CC: recipientsYou More BCC: recipientsYou Show Details FROM: Pugh & Company TO: ajhopkins1 Message flagged Tuesday, 7 February 2012, 17:34 ...
Additional Related
Resources
How To Use Ebay’s “pre-approved Buyer” Function. By Kirsten Hawkins For sellers who constantly have to put up with bid snipers, non-paying bidders and other anti-social, timewasting buyers, eBay’s ‘pre-approved buyer’ feature is a godsend.Pre-approving buyers Read more...
About Online Travel Auctions By Frank Johnson If you’ve never bid on airfare through an online travel auction site (websites such as SkyAuction and even Ebay), there are a few things you need to be mindful of. You can’t just jump into an auction Read more...
5 Easy Ways To Make Money On Ebay By Dave Bromley As the editor of the UK Auctionline Newsletter I receive a great number of e-mails from subscribers. Frequently the question they ask is, “Please tell me an easy way to make money on eBay.” I suppose Read more...
Should You Run Auctions On Other Sites Besides Ebay? By Kirsten Hawkins eBay doesn’t have very many competitors, and the ones that there are remain small by comparison – that’s part of what makes eBay so powerful for niche items. If you’re selling more common things, Read more...
