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.