should I wait to sell on ebay until spring?

[Drive-By-Shooter]

Lots of people overspent for Christmas. Perhaps January is not a good time to sell. March/April/May? anyone with knowledge or experience ? Not that it matters, but I am selling a Nikon lens.

 

[astroNikon]

People buy too to get the stuff they didn't get for Christmas.

 

[fmw]

You just need one buyer for each product. That buyer could appear at any time of the year.

 

[Drive-By-Shooter]

true, but you need more than one for a good auction!

looks like camera sales increase over 50% from jan to april: http://improvephotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/DSLR-vs-Mirrorless-Sales.jpg

 

[fmw]

true, but you need more than one for a good auction!

looks like camera sales increase over 50% from jan to april: http://improvephotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/DSLR-vs-Mirrorless-Sales.jpg

Ebay allows you to sell without an auction.

 

[bratkinson]

There's a couple of 'mentalities' to selling on ebay. Some sellers will have an auction that starts pretty close to what they hope to get for their item. Many times, they won't get any bids other than 'bottom fishers' that put in a bid hoping that if nobody else bids on it, they'll get it. My estimate is that happens about 5-10% of the time. Other sellers will have a ridiculously low starting price...$1, for example, and it will get bid up between 3-5 'inexperienced' bidders in the first couple of days. Usually, the item will sell for a reasonably-expected price. Others, including myself, have started quite low, but put a 'reserve' on it, meaning it's not a sale until the bid price reaches X dollars. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Alternatively, one can have a 'fixed price' buy-it-now non-auction that allows offers to be made. One can set limits on the offers such as reject all below $X and automatically accept an offer of $Y or more.

Ideally, do a search on ebay for the item you're about to sell. Get a 'feel' for what prices they are getting. Also, look at the types of auctions/fixed price listings they are. Also, scroll down on the list of active items and click 'completed sales' on the lower left of screen. That will show you what they actually are going for. Of course, condition is everything, including having the original packaging. Lenses, etc, selling for really low prices are usually indicated as 'non-working' or 'for parts'.

Lastly, I try to set up my listings to end about 7PM Pacific Time...10PM Eastern. I usually shoot for Saturdays and Sundays as well. But week nights work OK, too. My goal is to get people home from work, after dinner, cruising ebay to see if there's anything they are interested in. FWIW, I have several searches saved on my 'favorites' list in the Firefox browser I use for ink cartridges for my printers. Epson printers are VERY fussy about getting geniune cartridges. I tried compatibles, and 50-80% of them are refused by the printers. I wait for someone to put them up at very cheap prices, such as $6-7 for the exact cartridge available at Staples for $16-20. I just snapped up 9 cartridges for $55, a bit over $6 each...with free shipping. I check multiple times each day to catch the 'really good' prices.

 

[KmH]

Another selling strategy is to time the end of your auction for a 'pay weekend'.

A pay weekend is a weekend when the most people that get paid weekly and twice a monthly get paid.
Like weekends on the 15th and 30th of a month.
This weekend January 14 & 15th would be a 'pay weekend'.

 

[robbins.photo]

I don't usually recommend you set a low start price with a reserve. Frankly it annoys most bidders to no end having to "guess" what your minimum is, and since there are usually so many other people selling the same or a similar item folks tend to shy away from those types of auctions. In my experience your better off doing the buy it now, with offers, or just setting a low minimum bid and letting it sell for whatever it sells for.

I haven't yet put an auction in without a reserve that the item ended up selling for an unreasonably low price. About the only time you see that happen is when it is an extremely limited audience type of item, the sort of thing that very few people would be interested in - in which case your better off doing a fixed price/buy it now sort of affair.

 

[pixmedic]

I only sell now as a "buy it now" with a best offer option.
I don't always get the best price because of crazy bidders, but I also don't have to settle for a price I'm not comfortable with.
The nice thing about ebay is that it gives you plenty of different ways to offer a product for sale. Some buyers even prefer one over the other. I only bid as a last resort. If I can, I would rather just find a good buy it now price or one I can make an offer on.

 

[john.margetts]

I don't usually recommend you set a low start price with a reserve. Frankly it annoys most bidders to no end having to "guess" what your minimum is, and since there are usually so many other people selling the same or a similar item folks tend to shy away from those types of auctions. In my experience your better off doing the buy it now, with offers, or just setting a low minimum bid and letting it sell for whatever it sells for.

on a number of occasions I have tried to buy a camera with a low starting price and a larger reserve and have been unable to buy the camera because I was the only bidder and was unable to increase my initial bid to reach the reserve.

 

[robbins.photo]

I don't usually recommend you set a low start price with a reserve. Frankly it annoys most bidders to no end having to "guess" what your minimum is, and since there are usually so many other people selling the same or a similar item folks tend to shy away from those types of auctions. In my experience your better off doing the buy it now, with offers, or just setting a low minimum bid and letting it sell for whatever it sells for.

on a number of occasions I have tried to buy a camera with a low starting price and a larger reserve and have been unable to buy the camera because I was the only bidder and was unable to increase my initial bid to reach the reserve.

I've run into that one too. It got to the point where I pretty much ignore auctions where the reserve hasn't been met as a result. I think I've only managed to get one item bidding on an auction like that one, they are just too much of a pain. So anymore I just skip them. I don't mind maybe paying a bit extra for buy it now just to avoid the hassle.

 

[bratkinson]

I thoroughly understand the frustration of trying to guess what the reserve is on an auction. I use it only to get the buy-it-now option to stay available for a while. What I've discovered is that in auctions with buy-it-now, after the first bid is made, the buy-it-now disappears! Maybe ebay has changed this, I haven't checked lately. But, I discovered that having a reserve will keep the buy-it-now option available until the reserve is met. I haven't used many reserves, but when I do, I set it at about 75% of what I think it should go for.

One of the things I wrestle with putting items up on ebay is what price to set as a buy-it-now. When I put something up on ebay, my goal is to get it sold over getting 'top dollar'. Put another way...I want it GONE as soon as possible. So, once I've figured out what the item should typically fetch, if I really want it GONE, I'll set the buy-it-now at about 90% of that price...sometimes even lower.

It's different if you're trying to make money using ebay vs getting rid of stuff I don't want any more. Perhaps 12 years ago already, I discovered I could buy individual items on ebay, group them together and make about 10-15% in the process. It was a far cry from making a living kind of money, but it was some easy income.

These days, it's considerably more difficult to 'make a living' on ebay because the expenses have risen dramatically. Newbies to ebay selling forget how big of a 'bite' they take. In particular, ebay takes 10% or more of your sale price + shipping charges! 'Back when', people would sell $100 computer CPUs for $20 + $80 shipping, as ebay didn't take a cut of the shipping charges listed in the auction. It didn't take them long to figure out they (ebay) were getting screwed, so now they take almost nothing to list an item, and hit you for 10% of the final amount you'll be receiving. Then Paypal takes their cut...another 2-4%. I haven't taken the time to figure out exactly what percent they take as I don't sell more than 15-20 items per year. Another big cut is the actual shipping cost you pay. Don't forget that packaging materials, if you have to buy them, are part of your costs. Shipping tape is my biggest expense. I buy cheap stuff at Walmart or Staples. I get enough boxes from Amazon that I could ship just about anything I can carry. But shipping company charges get worse by the year. I sometimes figure out in advance what package and carrier I will use when the item sells. But as anyone knows, shipping cross-country is more expensive than only a couple of states away. Living in New England, I've found a good share of my buyers live on the West Coast. Go figure. Twice in the past year, I privately emailed West Coast sellers whose item(s) I had just bought if he thought that a big number of his buyers were on the East Coast. Yep! So now, I 'price' various shipping costs to Denver and hope I don't get a California buyer. Unfortunately, I did that about a year ago when I sold my pedal steel guitar on ebay and got...you guessed it!...a California buyer! I had a $100 shipping charge in the ebay listing, but it came to $135 to ship it with insurance. When possible, I've found USPS 'flat rate' boxes usually the least costly to ship, especially as items get heavier (like lenses). And even though ebay offers both USPS and Fedex shipping options, finding a Fedex place to drop off something too big for one of their drop boxes gets more difficult every year...and I'm a former Fedex Ground owner-operator and later on, employee (for the insurance). So, for me, it's either USPS or UPS...sorry Fedex.