How to Decide Whether to Use Buy it Now or Regular Auctions on Ebay

When you sell items on eBay, you have to make many decisions. What day of the week do I start my auction? What time of day do I start? What should be my starting price? How long should I let the auction run? All of these decisions need to be made.

Here's an idea for whether you should sell your item using a Buy it Now, Regular auction, or Dutch auction (Multiple quantity). The decision is definitely an experience situation. However, here are some guidelines to maximize your profits. You need to answer a couple of questions first. What are you selling? How many of them do you have to sell? How soon do you need to move them? How popular is the item?

If you have a unique item and only have one of them, run a regular auction without Buy it Now (BIN) for 7 days if you can see others recently sold, or 10 days if you can't see any recent sold history which probably means it is hard to find.

If you have an item that you can repeatedly sell and have a continuous supply, run both Dutch and regular auctions. Stagger the auctions throughout the day. You want you item to appear on the first page of the auctions. They do land on the front page when you first list them and rapidly move down and off the front page as more items are listed by other sellers. Here's a possible schedule for the East coast. Adjust the times depending on your time zone.

10:30am 1 item regular auction with Buy it Now
3:30pm 3 items Dutch auction
7:30pm 1 item regular auction with Buy it Now
11:00pm 3 items Dutch auction

Space out the auctions evenly alternating between the formats (regular, Dutch, etc.)

Why should you offer Buy it Now? Some people hate waiting and bidding and will use the BIN, while others feel comfortable about the minimum bid and get their item in the Dutch format style.

If you are consistently selling out of your product, add another auction or two. Again be aware of the goal of having your auctions appear on the front page, so space them out evenly. Also, eBay does not like it if you have 10 identical auctions running at the same time, so watch your step here.

You will not have a bidding war when you use the Dutch Auction (Multiple quantities) format. The purpose of this format is to sell a bunch of whatever you have fast. When you use the Dutch auction, don't use 100 or any other large number like I see many sellers do on eBay. Why? Think like a buyer. If I see a Dutch auction with 99 quantity, I'll think, "Yeah, I can buy this anytime." If I see a quantity of 3, I'll think, "Ooh...I better bid now because it looks like they're almost all gone!"