|
If you're new to online auction selling, you may have posted some items with provocative headers and great descriptions, and ended up getting very few bids, or none at all. Why is this?
It could be that no one is interested in what you're selling. Or, you may be committing either or both of the two most common mistakes that new sellers make.
What might those be? First, there's the "RARE!!!" faux pas. A seller gets really excited over finding, for example, a 1939 copy of The Lucky Strike Story and immediately posts it as an "Extremely! RARE! book!" with an opening bid of $33.99.
What's wrong with that? Not much (though the price is a bit high going in), unless there are already six other copies of this book up for auction, each with an opening bid of less than $8.00.
This is pretty much what I saw happen recently on eBay. (I've changed the headers and prices to protect ... I'm not sure whom, but someone.) At least one of the sellers could have saved themselves time, listing fees, and embarrassment by doing a search on the book's title. Then they would have found out that the half-dozen copies posted weren't selling. Which meant that theirs wasn't going to sell, either.
So, check out your competition before posting. If the market is currently flooded, hold off. It's rather embarrassing to label an item "really rare," and then discover that there are a bunch more of the same item languishing with no bids.
I've already implied the second mistake new sellers often make: Setting prices too high. This usually involves a mixture of wishful thinking and ignorance. The wishful thinking may go something like this, "I've never seen one of these Tootsietoy Dune Buggies, and it's really old. It might be worth fifty bucks, so I'll set the minimum bid at fifty bucks!"
That would be nice, but you have to remember that just because an item is really old, and you've never seen one, doesn't mean that it's automatically worth big bucks. Tootsietoy may have run off two million of those dune buggies, and thirty years isn't enough time for enough of them to have disappeared to create a rarity.
The original price has a lot to do with this, as well. A thirty year-old Tootsietoy dune buggy probably sold for a dollar, so a lot were sold. A thirty year-old R/C airplane may have sold for two hundred dollars, so relatively few were sold. The latter would obviously be heading rapidly toward "rare" status.
(Actually, you might accept it as a general rule of thumb that, the newer an item is, the longer it's going to take for it to become rare, because many more of a given item were made thirty years ago than were made eighty years ago. It's because of the relative size of markets, which keep growing. Right along with that, you can figure that things like expensive jewelry, collectibles, Jaguar XK-Es, and other high-priced items are fewer in number than common magazines, household items, books, toys, and the like.)
If you start getting that "rare" feeling about an item you know little about, take the time to research it. Pay little attention to what others are asking for similar items. Opening bids are often meaningless. Look for items with real bids. These serve as a guide in pricing your item. And don't neglect Completed Auctions. The average final price of items like yours is an excellent guide to setting minimum bids and buy-now amounts, as well as a reserve amount (if you intend to use a reserve).
Pay no attention to those really big prices you'll find for your item at some Web site, or in stores or antique malls. Buyers expect to get a "deal" at auction, so attract bidders with a fair opening bid. If the item is really rare, you'll get what it's worth.
What about the "book price"? You may have seen a 1955 car model for sale at an antique mall for $150, which the seller says is "the book price." That doesn't mean it sold for that much. (Look again in a month; it will probably still be there.) Check current and past auctions to see what such items are really bringing. If it's $150 at an antique mall, the odds are it'll sell for half that at auction. In the end, an item is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it.
Of course, if you have a really rare item, like a transparent slide rule (the last one of those I saw went for $366), don't be afraid to price it accordingly. Just make sure it really is rare, that there aren't several already posted, and that the average price for similar items sold recently isn't ten bucks.
|
