Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about buy it now vs auctions on eBay listings.
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Buy It Now Vs Auctions On eBay
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about buy it now versus auctions on eBay listings.
Rob: All right guys, so today's gonna be a fun one. We're jumping in and talking about buy it now, listings versus auction listings cuz you do really have two options when you're selling on eBay.
Melissa: And this is a question we actually got in from one of the, our listeners. So Suzanne, from some small things we're gonna answer her question and let me, I'll just go ahead and read it. If there are no watchers and no bids, does eBay punish you in SEO for canceling live listings and re-listing? I called eBay and they said no, but I'm not sure. I do this a lot because I'm new and I'm trying to find out what type of listings, auction versus buy it now is working best. I've also realized I'm excluding the West coast when I make listings end at 7:00 AM EST. So I'm changing that now too. So we have a lot of fun things I wanna talk about. So.
Rob: There's a lot to break apart in this. Thank you so much for writing in and asking any these questions.
So we would love to actually break these apart. So first thing, we don't do a lot of auction listings right now. Back in the day, a long, long time ago, we did do auctions. If that is your what you want to do, I'm gonna give you the best solution for doing an auction. Do a 10 day auction and do it listing it on Thursday night at our, we're on EST timeframe.
Do it Thursday night at 10 o'clock at night. You're gonna run through two weekends with the auction. eBay's activity boosts up over the weekend, so you're getting the most bang for your buck. You're running through two weekends on the auction to where you're gonna get more people, and then it's gonna go out on Sunday night.
Sunday night is when people typically are on there the most and that's where you're gonna get the most money because people are not working. They're there, they're hopefully watching the item. You got the buzz they get, they saved it in their eBay, they're gonna get the notifications that it's gonna go out on Sunday night.
So that's the best bang for your buck on auction listings.
Melissa: Yeah. Two weekends and ending on Sunday night was, was always best for you. Yeah. I think ending on Thursday nights sometimes work too. Like you did, you've done both.
Rob: But listing on Thursday night typically is the best.
Melissa: I know. But you also ended on, cuz you don't, like, you don't wanna end on a Friday night. People, if they're not.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: You know, they're going out or whatever. I mean, not, I don't know. You, you have to kind of think of what people are doing on Sunday. Normally people are at home getting ready for work the next day. So Sunday nights are usually a good one for listings to go out. So.
Rob: And I'm assuming from the question that you are, you have auctions, live auctions and then you are canceling the auction. Because you have zero watchers, zero bids, you're canceling the auction and re-listing it. I don't know. I, we're not part of eBay, you know, their team or anything like that. So I don't know what the algorithms think about that. I do know in auctions, eBay, when you do an auction, they don't want you to cancel it.
Typically yet they're, if you have an auction live they want you to run through the auction, the auction timeframe, they're gonna drum up as much business as they can for you through the algorithms. Anybody who jumps on there, even if they don't save it. Even if they just look at your listing, eBay's gonna keep sending them that listing every time they jump into the app or they're gonna send 'em emails.
Hey, you looked at this, probably you know, the other day you looked at this, look at it again at something like that, they're gonna throw it back in front of potential buyers for you. So, I, I don't know, practice. No. I don't know what the rep told you that you spoke to on eBay, but I know that it's not a good practice to do that.. .Now, totally different if you have buy it now prices and now we can jump into the buy it now portion of eBay.
Melissa: Yeah, so we do mostly buy it now. I wanted to add too, on the auctions. Sure. Reasons you would do an auction. So you said you're, you know, trying to get your business going, you're trying to get your, your store going and that makes sense to use auctions.
You totally can. What we would recommend for starting out, if you're gonna do auctions, do some items that you really don't care if they go for cheap. Like it's fine, you know, get some activity in your store or your account, and it's fine if they just go for cheap and you don't really care because you're trying to build up that feedback.
You're trying to build up just that eBay knows you're a seller. So just maybe list those kind of items. That would be one way or another reason you use auction now, like even once you're an established seller, is if you have like a collector item or something that's super hot and trendy right now.
Sometimes auctions can be really good for those kind of items too. So, but typically now we do mostly buy it now because Amazon changed the game a lot a couple years ago. I mean, eBay started with auctions like that is where they, cuz people get sucked into auctions. You're like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get this at such a great deal.
And then by the time it's about to go out, like you haven't been, you know, you think about when you used to bid on stuff on eBay, what was the bidding tool you used to bid night? Yeah. Back in the day, like you could, you know, you're trying to bid, you wanna get the lowest cost, but also, okay, what's my highest price that I'm willing to go?
And then you get emotional about the item because somebody's bidding with you. So that's why auctions work so well. But now people want things. When they want 'em.
Rob: Quick, they want 'em. Amazon's changed the world. Yep. And that's what they are. When you see something in, just think about yourself. When I need something, I don't wanna find it on eBay and then have to wait a week for it to go out and do that.
And you can totally put buy it now on auctions, that you can have people do that as well, but the price typically is a lot higher than whatever it starts at. So nobody's gonna go in and buy it now when the auction price is at a dollar and the buy it now is at $150, nobody's gonna go in and do that.
So typically the buy it now prices, when you don't have an auction, somebody can jump in and that is the price. That is how we sell our stuff. Now, the other portion of this that goes into knowing that you're pricing your items right? That is a huge portion of this, that, I mean, we can even break down how to price your items.
You're going in and checking comps of other items that have sold. You find your exact item, find what has sold in the past 90 days, and you have a good idea of what your item is worth. And you also look at the active items, the items that are listed currently to see what the prices are on that. If you wanna sell your items quick, you wanna price below what the active items are.
But you also wanna look at the comps. You wanna look at these sold items in the last 90 days to know what your item has the potential of selling for. Yeah.
Melissa: And so back to the original question of, is it, you know, bad practice for that for buy it now? It's fine if you do want to pull it off, pull it off it off and re-list it, we do that periodically.
We'll refresh listings or pull 'em off and, and re-list them. Because you have to think of it, they're just listing if they don't have, you know, much activity or you wanna change some stuff, versus an auction, people are invested in eBay. Like you said. I didn't even think about like eBay sending out notifications to people.
Even if they just skimmed by your item, they might send them a notification or just they looked at your item. They might not even be watching it. Yeah. But they might get it back in their feed, and then if you delete it, eBay's gonna be like, okay, well they keep deleting these live auctions, so it might not work.
Rob: No. It might show the algorithms that they don't want to actually show your items more because you are pulling them off on a live auction. So, like Melissa said, it's different on the buy it now prices are the buy it now auction, or sorry, the buy it now listings. It is totally different, pulling those off, to get them back on, re-list them as new listings, totally different than actual live auction, so we wouldn't recommend it. But like I said, we don't work for eBay. We don't know exactly how the algorithms work. We just know.
Melissa: I'm not sure they all understand either. Yeah. Even if they work for eBay.
Rob: Exactly. So we, we just understand the whole process because we've been doing it for years, but right now, all of our listings, we sell as a buy it now price.
We don't do auctions anymore. Back in the day, it sucked a lot more people in. It was easier to do. But now people are, they want the, that, they want that item quick. And if you have that buy now price on there. And it's very competitive with whether other items are priced and it's very, you know, that items have sold for that price.
So it is the going rate of that, you totally will be able to sell it.
Melissa: Yeah. And if once you do get yourself established as a seller, you can be more competitive. I'm not competitive with your prices. I mean more like you can ask more and you can be on the higher end. So no, you know, when you're starting out, if you have the exact same item, exact same condition as an established seller, you're gonna have to price it lower.
Cause that's your only chip in the game really to get it sold unless somebody just doesn't see the other item. But once you're an established seller, you have great feedback. Then you can be right up with the other person too. So that helps. Or you can be even on the higher end, depending. We typically list most of our stuff in the middle to high range of the comps.
So because we know, like we were established, we have good feedback and that we can ask that. But in the beginning when you're starting, just know that you might have to do it a little bit lower. Yeah. And our game changer for us as we sell bigger items. So those bigger items, a lot of people will not sell and they will not, I'm sorry, they will not ship and we will ship.
Rob: So that gives us the edge. So somebody, who has something, say a NordicTrack, and they're trying to sell it for $200, without shipping, I know I can go in there and offer $350, $400 for the same item. If I'm willing to deliver it to the person's house, with shipping. So that just gives you kind of an idea, a breakdown of the whole process and how the whole thing works.
But you're rocking it, keep going with it. It's a, it's a fun game and the more and more you actually are selling on eBay, you're learning this process, the better and better you get at it. So yeah. Awesome.
Melissa: Now with your buy it now listings, do you list with, offers accepted, like you said, accept offers or no.
Or do you do both?
Rob: Such a great question. We do not, we do not do accepted offers. So the reason that we don't do that, is because of I want a buyer to look at my listing, see that price, and then I want them to buy it immediately because it is priced correctly. It's priced what the market will bear.
It's priced competitively with the other active listings. I want them to buy it. If I put a send offer, whatever it is, what's a mark on it? You can send the buyer an offer. Yeah. Whatever it is. Yeah. Offers accepted. If, if I see that on a listing that I'm trying to buy, I'm not gonna pay that full price for it.
I'm always gonna start sending offers out to see what I can get the buyer to. So on my side as being a seller, I don't want somebody to come and start offering me less money. I want them to buy it because it's priced right. If I do do that, I know all potential buyers are gonna start sending the offers before they actually buy it.
Right. That's my reasoning on it. I have already priced it. I've done the research on comps. I've done the research on active listings. I have it priced very, very competitively that I know it's at a good price, and it should sell for that price when the right buyer comes along.
Melissa: And you can still accept offers when it's listed at the price that you want, people will still send you offers.
Rob: So absolutely they'll send you a message saying, Hey, will you do it for this price? And they'll send you a message, but it won't be a binding offer like they will with the sending offer option.
Melissa: So they can't send an actual offer if you don't have offers turned on. Okay. No. But you can send an offer back once they message you. Correct?
Rob: You absolutely can. So if somebody messaged you a question about an item and says, hey, would you take $1,200 for this? You can totally, at the bottom of the list it says, send a one-time offer. You can click on that and send them an offer for the money that they said. Or you can raise it a little bit, whatever you wanna do, that's where your negotiation can counter offer.
Exactly. That's where your negotiation can start. Now, one thing that we didn't talk about is on those listings where you're not accepting offers and then you start to get watchers on those listings and you start to get views on the listing. You can totally send out an offer to somebody that doesn't show them when they look at it.
It doesn't, when they're browsing items on eBay, it doesn't show that you accept offers, but when they're, they click to watch your item, you can totally, as a seller, send out offers to those people who are watching your items to try and drum up a little business. We do do that from time to time. I will jump in and I will send some offers to see if I can do it, get some stuff rolling.
Absolutely. When I'm ready to, to, to move some items, and I'm willing to take a little bit less than my original price that I did. I will absolutely send an offer out. eBay will only send it to the people who are watching that item. So a really, really cool feature that they've done. Yeah, and it really helps things move as well.
Melissa: And I will say there is a correlation of you sending offers, making a couple sales, and then snowballing into a couple more sales. It's really. It's crazy how it always happens. Like, you know, you get some activity going, and then it keeps on going and absolutely there's a couple sales and then you gotta fulfill and then you don't do it, you don't do it again.
So, so yeah. But there is definitely a correlation of that.
Rob: Our sales usually come in threes, so if we sell one thing, we know you got a couple more coming right back to back and we sell high profit items, so we're selling. Yeah.
Melissa: A couple thousand dollars.
Rob: Expensive, expensive items to where we're doing that.
Melissa: So, yeah. So I also wanna say, what was, I was trying to think of the last thing you did on an auction and why you did it. It, it was a couple years ago, I think it was those taillights. It was absolutely was that the last one you've done?
Rob: Absolutely. And I did it to get something sold quickly and I started it out low and I knew the potential of, amount of people that were actually looking for those items was big.
So it was a tow truck taillight. We got it from the flea market. We only paid like $2.50 for two of 'em, we got two of 'em, and I think that's what I started the auction at was $2.50. Ended up selling them for roughly $150, something like that. But I knew that the buzz was there.
If you're trying to, how'd you, how'd you know that by the other items that were selling and by the other Yeah, just the activity.
Melissa: So there was a lot of 'em that were selling often?
Rob: There weren't a lot of 'em. Okay. But they were selling and they were selling for expensive amounts of money. Okay? So if you do look at the item that you're trying to sell and there's a lot of buzz and there's a lot of, activity for those items, you can do an auction and do it and it should go up, but you definitely have to list it on the right timeframe and the day so when it goes out, people are not working. People are getting that notification and they have the opportunity to buy it versus doing something else like in the middle of the day at work in the morning when people are getting ready for work. You do not want auctions going out at that timeframe.
Melissa: Yeah, I was trying to think like, what made you decide you to, you want, we were trying to turn quick. Okay. And you got it for two bucks. I think that's another, yeah. Key too. Like it's how much you spend on an item. Cuz you never do reserves, right? No. That's cost more money. It does. We don't, we're not into doing subtitles or reserves or anything that cost extra on the listing part.
Rob: I always want the free listing for us. We wanna be able to list it and it doesn't cost us a penny. We don't pay anything until, until the back end when it actually sells. That is our goal, is not to have to pay a penny on anything. Yeah. Until it sells. Yeah.
Melissa: So we don't do any front end. All of our fees are on the back end, whether we do some promoted listings, that's something we do.
So we'll pay that, but it's all on the back end. It's not on the front. So, so yeah. So. Thank you so much for writing in your, your question, Suzanne. If anybody you know, you do have a question that you'd love us to answer on the podcast, we would love to just go to fleamarketflipper.com/question and submit your question and hopefully we'll be able to answer it on the podcast, one of the episodes. So.
Rob: We'll see you on the next episode.