Overstock Auctions rolled out "Completed Auctions Search" on Thursday. The new function is accessible on the "advanced search" page. This has been a much requested feature to help buyers and sellers research how much an item sold for on the site in the past.
Sellers on eBay rely heavily on completed-item search to help them research selling prices and sell-through rates and to get ideas on presentation of an item.
Many people are likely to use Overstock Auctions' new feature to try and calculate the auction site's sell-through rates. Overstock rolled out its auctions late last year and is positioning itself as a competitor, albeit small competitor, to eBay.
The company has plans to rollout integrated search for certain auction sellers into its main site, a move designed to drive customers from Overstock.com to the site's auction listings. The company has partnered with BuySafe to help ensure the integrity of sellers who are featured in Overstock.com's search results.
Overstock said about 100,000 daily visitors search the auction site for a total of 250,000 searches a day on Overstock Auctions, but 1 million daily visitors search the main Overstock site for a total of about 1 million searches a day on Overstock.com. The new functionality for integrated search is expected to go live in a matter of weeks.
Overstock Auctions also announced on Thursday it had changed auction bid increments (http://digbig.com/4dkaj). The increments had been based on a starting increment of 1 percent of the current price rounded to the next 10-cent, 25-cent or dollar. Now increments are based on 2 percent of the current price rounded to the next 25-cent, 50-cent or dollar.
Sellers had complained that many buyers were not using proxy bidding, and under the old increment system, it was taking an unwieldy number of bids to raise the price of auctions even a small amount.
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