Pricing Your Items Right - Discovering eBay Success
When you’re a new ebay seller, you probably don’t realise the importance of pricing your auctions correctly when you are discovering your ebay success plan. With many new business sellers not knowing that there is a ‘pricing’ plan that needs to be formulated, after all eBay is an auction site. However, eBay auctions aren’t the same as other auctions for houses that you may have visited in the off-line world, but, are in fact there is lots of work on the sellers behalf in determining the right price for an item in an ebay auction.
So, there are essentially only three prices that you ax the seller can set for an ebay auction – the ‘buy it now’ price, the starting price for a bid, and the reserve price that you would like to set, so that the item will be sold at this price at the very least. Not all of these three prices are required to start an ebay auction, the only one being the starting price, with both the ‘buy it now’ and reserve prices being optional. When you are starting an auction, you should be aware that placing the starting price at more than $50 could impact negatively on people bidding on your item – so, low initial pricing is the key to get people bidding on your product.
However, when you set a low starting bid, you will need to create a reserve price for any bids that are made on the auction to protect your item. You do have the opportunity to sell the item below that of your reserve price, but you will not be made to do this. So, if you post an item for auction and place a reserve price of say $100 on it, and the highest bid on the auction is $50, then you will not have to sell to the highest bid ($50), as it hasn’t met your ebay auction price and so this won’t meet your goals in your ebay success plan. At this stage, you can close the auction without negative feedback or repercussions, but, make sure that when setting your reserve price make sure that it is the absolute lowest price that you would sell your item for. Always keep in mind how much the item cost you initially and how much it is worth when you posted it on your ebay auction.
Using the Buy it Now button
If you choose to have a look at the ‘buy it now’ button, then this option allows you to set a price where the buyer can choose to not bid on the item, but buy it at the set price in the hope that they will secure an ebay auction bargain. You can utilise this option for any type of item you want and it generally should be in agreement with the reserve price that you have implemented on your auction listing, and is a great option to use if you have some similar items on different auctions. Shipping also has a price, so, you will need to take this cost into consideration when deciding on a buy it now and reserve price for your auction. A huge bonus that would help here would be to offer free shipping, and include the cost into the above prices – this will result in more people placing more bids, which will hopefully result in a higher selling price to your auction, and ebay success. You will need to make sure that potential buyers realize that you are offering free shipping though!
Before you set any of your prices, you need to look at the worth of the item, as the item may be worth different amounts in different markets. However, you are selling on eBay and its kind of a different world! Do some research and find out the prices of some similar items that have sold on ebay, before you look at setting any concrete prices. If your item is a collectible or a high ticket item, then have the item evaluated to ensure you’re not going to lose any money and build on your ebay success.
