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The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.
If you are having trouble getting bids on your auctions, the problem could be:
Remember, auction behavior is not always rational. In fact, you'd like to encourage irrationally high bidding -- a spirit of competition and wanting to win that goes beyond the desire to simply buy a particular object. Bids attract more bids. An auction can sit idle day after day, then once one bid is posted others come in and the auction comes to life.
To diagnose your situation, first add counters to your auction pages. You can do that quickly and for free from AuctionRover's Auction Manager. If you are getting lots of visits but no bids at all, the odds are good that your initial price is too high or your description confusing.
Then if the auction ends with No Sale, restart with a lower price or, if you have a number of similar items, start a new auction that combines several items into a single lot, with the same starting price you previously had for one of them.
Basically, you want to make that starting price so attractive that potential buyers won't want to let this opportunity get away. But at the same time, you want it high enough so it will be worth your while to go through all the hassle of posting and shipping and record-keeping that online auctioning entails. It will probably take you about the same amount of effort to sell a lot of five as it would to sell a single item. So sweeten the offer by making larger lots, rather than reducing the price.
I was recently selling Davy Crockett cards at eBay. The green series sold great in lots of four cards, with a $5 starting price. But for the orange series (which apparently is more common), I got zero bids for eight auctions, each for a lot of four, with the same $5 starting price. The next week I regrouped those orange cards in lots of six -- taking new photos, editing the descriptions, and keeping the starting price at $5. This time they all sold, and the average winning bid was about $10.
You also should take a close look at your auction descriptions. Many people are inclined to make their descriptions very busy -- so busy, in fact, that potential bidders just click away in annoyance. You may have the right words, which help people find your auctions using search. But with type size and color and other effects, you've made the description almost unreadable.
Keep in mind that a special effect -- even something as simple as upper case, large type face, italics, or bold -- only attracts attention and aids in communication if it stands out; and it can only stand out, if there is some baseline to begin with. As a rule of thumb, express your main message with plain ordinary text. Then use special effects to emphasize just one sentence or just a few words. Less is more.
Next week we'll look at special, creative steps you might want to try to get the bidding started.
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
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