Win some lose some

26-04-2007

My success with eBay so far has been.. a little unpredictable. Some items have sold better than expected, and others sold for their minimum, or not at all. I've played with auction duration, ending times, starting price, and used large photos. All with mixed results. I've even used SEO techniques to increase exposure to potential buyers with only some degree of success. Most of the items I've sold have been small enough to travel to the winning bidders via a cheap recorded postal service. But now I wanted to shift bigger items. Items that the buyers would have to collect due to their size and weight.

I have a couple of old bicycles in my garage that I need to get rid of. I've had them since I was a child and even though I've held on to them for so long, I was under no illusion that they were actually worth something and that they would fetch large sums of money. However I could not bring myself to take them to the dump so I decided to Freecycle them so that I at least knew they would go to someone that wanted them. But first I would try and sell them. The listing fee was only a few pence and if I listed them for 99p and they sold, it would cover my listing costs and eBay final value fee. If they did not sell, I'd only be out of pocket for a few pence.

I took some digital photos of both bikes and hosted them on Detox rather than paying eBay for displaying extra photos. You can edit the HTML of your listing to include externally hosted images, as long as they are of the item that you are selling. Next, I trawled the net for information on the bikes and discovered that both were collectable. I made notes of the terminology used on the collectors sites for use in my auction descriptions.

The first bike I listed was my Raleigh Grifter. I put this up for 10 days making sure it ended on one evening at the weekend. I've discovered that your item is more likely to sell on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening when buyers are more than likely to be in front of a computer.

The bike gained a lot of watchers over those 10 days but bidding did not actually start to take off until the last day of the auction. We watched the bids slowly crawl up from a pound, to 5, then 10 until it reached 45 pounds! We were both amazed. Emma and I were watching the bidding right up until the auction ended. Even though I was the one selling the bike, it was Emma that kept saying "lets see what the bid is up to now!" She was glued to the computer, constantly refreshing the page every few minutes. The bike finally sold after 28 bids for a total of 62 pounds. Not bad for a rusty old bike.

I was curious about who had bought my old Grifter for so much. Turned out that the buyer was a guy from Essex who bought it for nostalgia reasons. He owned one as a child and decided he wanted to own one again.

Now that I had sold one bike it was time to sell the other. The same techniques employed to sell the Grifter, were used to sell my 1970s Raleigh Tomahawk. This was the little brother to the Raleigh Chopper. I set the auction to 10 days and watched the bicycle gain watchers in the same way the Grifter had. Someone put a bid on for 99p in the first few days but I was confident that it would go for more. My research had shown that it was a collectors item.

I later realised that I had made a mistake. I'd set the auction to 10 days thinking it would end Sunday afternoon but I had miscalculated and the auction would actually end Monday afternoon. Oh no! The auction would end while everyone was at work. I could only hope that some of the watchers would bid at the last minute.

I watched as the time left, crept slowly downwards until the auction ended with no new bids. The bidder who bid 99p won the bike. Later, a friend told me that I could of cancelled the auction if I had wished to. I did not know you could do that.

I reasoned that at least the bicycle had sold and that it wasn't being thrown away. I think it was because the Grifter had done so well that my expectations had been raised. I was a little disappointed I'll admit.

The winning bidder collected the bike and told me that it was going to be fully restored. Then it was going to be shipped to France where its new owner was awaiting its arrival.

So there you go. I've sold both my childhood bikes, rusty as they were, raised 63 pounds, and cleared a lot of space in my garage. Not a bad result.

As for eBay, I'm still learning.