Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about buy it now vs. auction selling on eBay.
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Buy It Now Vs Auction Selling On eBay
Rob: What's up, pro flippers on today's episode we are talking about auction style versus buy it now listings on ebay and what should you be doing All right, guys. So today we are talking about how you should be listing your items on eBay. Should you be using auction style or listing them for buy it now prices?
And we're going to give you kind of the breakdown of what we do in our business.
Melissa: Because there's different ways, different strategies to go about obviously listing your items and, buy it now versus auction is actually a question that we get a lot, on social media, on whatever content we're putting out.
So, we thought we would talk about it again because it is a common question people have when they're first starting with eBay. Like, am I listing my stuff by it now? Am I listing it with auction? Which is better? Is, is one better than the other? Should I try both? What should I do?
Rob: Yep. So back when eBay started in the mid nineties, all you could do was auction.
That was what they were known for. You listed an item. It was an auction house pretty much that it went through I think seven days you can do seven, maybe 10 days, 10 days, I think came out a little bit later. But you can do a seven day auction. You put that thing on there. People got into a bidding war, your items went up and that was what it was known for back in the day.
And then they, integrated into a buy it now price along with an auction style. If somebody saw the auction, you had a buy it now price. If somebody wanted to pay as much as you were asking for it, they could do it. And then now you have the option to be able to either do an immediate buy it now price or the auction style, but you can only do I don't know if they allow you to do three days anymore.
I think it's a five a seven or a ten day auction It used to be three, seven, or ten? Three, five, seven, and ten I just don't know if there's a three day auction anymore So the biggest downfall to the auction style listings is you might not have enough people see your listing in that seven to ten day period three to five. Definitely not but seven to ten day period, that will allow you to get the, a majority, the, the majority of the money that the item is worth.
The people might not see it to bid it up to the price that you want for that item.
Melissa: Yeah. Cause the whole idea with the auction is to get as many people seeing it so that they start bidding. And if they start bidding on it early, obviously, cause it's low price, you started at say whatever item it is, you started at $2.
Okay. That's a great deal. I'm going to bid on it. And then the next person bids on it. And then it's like, it goes up and up and then the person's like, ah, now it's already at this price. Whatever, but the whole, thing is you get attached to the item and you want to win the auction. It feeds off the emotion of wanting to win the auction.
And it's still like, there's still auctions out there that you can do that. But, now auctions aren't quite used as much. You did have a strategy though on auctions that you used to use. You would always list them for 10 days because, so that more people would see them. Exactly. So more people would see them and so they would go through two weekends because you felt more people saw your items on the weekends.
Rob: Yeah. So if you listed an item, this is how I did it when I ran auctions. If you are debating why they're doing it, definitely test this out. I would list it on a Thursday night, roughly 9 p.m.. I would list it at 9 o'clock. It would go out at the same time you listed it. It would at the same time in 10 days, but it would go out on a Sunday night.
And people are away from work. They're sitting at their, on their, in their Lazy Boy. They're sitting at the, watching TV. At nine o'clock at night, typically, on a Sunday. So they can have that time to watch it. It goes through two weekends and the weekends are when the people, when the majority of people would see listings, anyways, so that was my strategy back in the day, that's how we sold stuff.
When we did use auctions as listed on a Thursday night. Let it go out on a Sunday night, and that's how we got the best results using the auction style.
Melissa: And things have changed since now there's smartphones and like people's buying habits are a little bit different.
Rob: So Amazon, Amazon's changed the industry for eBay because you can go on Amazon, you can buy something immediately and you can have it at your door that day or the next day.
People want stuff immediately. They want it quick. So eBay had to start changing with the times and That's when they started allowing people to do buy now prices. You can buy it It doesn't get shipped as quick because Amazon houses the majority of their stuff and they can get it to you very quickly But eBay has individual sellers that usually they're shipping it from their location their house wherever it's at, so we don't typically use auction style anymore.
We list everything that we have for buy it now prices. And the reason we do that is like I said, you don't get enough people to see that for it to go to the price that it should go for. If you want to sell something quick and you don't care what it sells for, list it for an auction. I would still do it for 10 days so you get the majority of the amount of people that are going to come through on two weekends. You're going to get them seeing that item and bidding on it, but that is not how we list our items. We've set a fair price, on the item and we know that it's a fair price. So when the right person comes along, they see that fair price and they're going to buy it no matter what. If they don't come along in the seven or 10 day period.
It's going to go way, way cheaper than what it really should do if you do not have that buyer on the, on track in that, in that timeframe.
Melissa: You just kind of think of yourself as a customer too. Like if you're looking for something, yeah, yes, auctions are fun. Like we'd like to go like live auctions or whatever.
But if you're going to buy something online, most likely you're going to look for it. You might do some research on the item, find the best price, compare prices, and then you want to buy it. You want it and you want it. You don't want to wait, you know, 10 days and then you might forget about it. Like most of the time, that's why, like, you know, you go buy something on Amazon or you put it in your car or you look at it, then you get retargeted with it.
Because you were, you were looking at it and you need to go buy it. So be reminded. But, but when people don't want to wait that long, basically is what it boils down to. So then there are times that you would still use auctions. Like we do 99.9 percent is our stuff is buy it now. Auctions could be useful for two, two different types of things. One of them being if you have a really hot item like a something that is a collectible or something that you know will get a lot of traction that could go higher than what like it's a collectible so it doesn't really it has the value to someone like it has it's not necessarily I don't know like it's more valuable to certain people who collect those things.
So, that kind of thing or something that is a, yeah, a very, wanted item that's limited. So, yeah.
Rob: Or rare item. Something that is hard to find that might have that, but you're still taking a chance. That you're going to get it to the right person and eBay actually you can set reserves on auctions as well It costs money.
It does it costs a lot more money to list that item to do it
Melissa: You don't want to give eBay more money than we have to.
Rob: And they charge you ahead of time so even if it sells or if it doesn't sell you're still paying and I think it's a percentage of what you're selling something for. So if you're selling something for a high price and you put a reserve price on it, you have to pay that no matter what they well, they set that reserve you do pay it when it lists so you don't pay it when it sells, you pay it ahead of time.
But they set that reserve price. At least, I haven't done one in a while on a reserve auction. But last time I did it, I know if you listed something for a reserve price of $10 versus something for $1,000 or $2,000, that entry, the, the charge, the charge that eBay charged you up front was a lot more money the higher the price was on that item.
Because you're, you're bringing in more higher quality people or higher people that are going to pay more money for that item. And then you still get charged on the back end of the final value fee. So that's one of the things, even if you do do an auction. Yeah, the reserve price is a killer because they'll charge you a lot of money up front.
And if it doesn't sell, you're still responsible to pay that money for them listing it for you.
Melissa: Yeah, and the other time that you could use an auction that could very well benefit you is when you're first starting out and you're trying to get your account growing. And you have items that you don't really, you're, kind of when you're starting out, you kind of can't, you know, bank on making a lot of money in the beginning because you want to grow your account. Now, you can do this quickly. You can grow it quickly, but more with items that you are maybe gonna donate. They're not junk, but it's something that maybe it's worth ten or twenty dollars, but you're gonna sell it for a dollar.
And then you can put it on auction and get people interested because that's a great price. So, like, it's something they want that they could go spend $10, $20 on or they can get it for a dollar or maybe it's an auction and it starts getting some more traction and that helps your stuff get seen more. So, so either when you're first starting out or you want to get your store kind of going again with an item that again, you don't really care about what it sells for.
So, but don't lose money on shipping. So.
Rob: Those are the two great strategies that you can use auctions for. Other than that, we, like I said, typically we don't use auctions. We set it at a fair price, wait for that buyer to come in. Sometimes it tell, I, I, I don't remember the last episode we did, but sometimes it, somebody can come in in 24 hours and buy something.
Could be two weeks and it could be two years. You never really know. But when you have that price set fair, think about those items. You can totally undercut yourself if you only allow 7 to 10 days for the right buyer to find that item and pay the price. And they're gonna get it for a steal if the right buyer doesn't come in.
And, or you don't have two buyers side by side bidding on that item. You're gonna lose what the availability. I mean what the potential is for that item. So we personally do not use auctions. But Melissa gave you the two strategies if you do want to use them the two strategies to when you would use exactly for auctions other than that we we do the buy it now prices and that's how we've really run our business on the buy it now high profit items.
Melissa: And the key is really setting your price correctly, like, and knowing what you can set it for.
So like we have, know that we have good feedback and that we can set our, we can be on the higher side of comps. So we don't have to, when you're starting out, you have to be on the lower side of comps because you're trying to sell your items. You're trying to get more feedback. You're trying to grow your store.
So you have to set your prices more competitively. Now we can be a little bit more on that higher range because we do have, you know, solid feedback and we sell these kinds of things and people can go to our store and see that. So, so as long as you're pricing fairly, and your stuff will get seen and you take good pictures and get those listings out there.
So, so short, long, short answer. We do buy it now. So, but yeah, anyways.
Rob: That's it. You guys rock. Have an amazing day. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with us and we cannot wait to see you on the next episode.