posted on July 7, 2001 09:03:57 AM new
I wonder if that also shows that the previous Yahoo strategy - using First Bid Wins - isn't as prevalent anymore. Would that be because the sellers who used it a lot no longer list?
I am still listing very little, just as time allows, but I haven't put "bid wins" in my auctions in months.
posted on July 7, 2001 03:24:02 PM new
I used to run several hundred first bid wins auctions on Yahoo. The main reason I quit doing this is because they shortened the title. It's hard to fit First Bid Wins! in 50 spaces. They now have the Buy Now feature, but I've been happy going back to the regular auction format so I have not tried that.
posted on July 9, 2001 05:15:35 AM new
There's been a lot of info lately published about "sell thru" rates both on Yahoo and on Bidville.
Before evaluating these #'s you must consider what the starting price is for any listing. Using the "1st Bid Wins" approach and starting the bidding at the sell price surely doesn't lead to as high a sell thru as an item listed in Bidville's recent $1 sale.
So there's no way really to interpret this data with the whole site's #'s. The best you can do is look at your own auctions and see if you are getting fair value and in a reasonable amount of time.
My experience with my remaining funny money is that Yahoo still has a lot of window shoppers, but they don't as often want to pay the same buy price as the same item recently sold for on ePay.
One recent example is a golf club I listed for $5 less than it sold for on ePay. It was listed for 14 days and had 550 hits but no buyer. So I'll list it on ePay, start it at $9.99 and it will fetch more than it could have been had for on Yahoo, with an instant purchase.
