beauty of the market
so wonderful to watch voluntary transactions. my typical routine when selling on eBay is to start the auction at one dollar or less. that doesn’t work for something obscure with few serious bidders, but it’s rarely a risk with anything halfway popular. often, you’re much better off starting very low. it might be bad for those sorting by descending price to weed out trash, but it usually gets brought up into the ranks soon enough by nibblers (gotta love the poor nibblers 
). it encourages bid momentum, and you can save some money on insertion fees by starting low. never been a fan of reserves, and i host everything but the gallery pic myself, so my insertion fees are sometimes crazy low.
i know a dude who starts every auction at ten cents, including shipping. he gets screwed now and then, but somehow even his obscure shit gets bid up. he sells old issues of “Pennsylvania Game News”, and the prices get up damned high. why? no clue. damned loyal buyers though. he made it to the 700s or so in feedback before his first neg, which i’m damned sure he didn’t deserve.
lately i’m wrestling with my whacked out detail verbosity. some of the most successful auctions are terse and sloppily written, with shitty pics. makes sense to sell that way if it works, because doing some auctions well takes a damned long time. however, i get pleasure from making informative auctions with plenty of good pics, so it balances a bit, as long as it doesn’t drive customers away — which in some cases i think it does, especially if you get too “policy” bound. people are too busy to fuck with all that.
the key is making an auction that attracts the speedy types, with detail options for the geeks like me. guess i need to work my ol’ “executive summary” routine from prior jobs into my eBay stuff. done it a bit, but haven’t mulled it properly. the great thing about eBay is that you can see what auctions work best, and steal from ‘em. at the least, any good seller needs to do some research for the best terms to throw in the auction title. you may think you’ve come up with good stuff, but if it doesn’t accommodate the behavior of the market, you’re wasting your time.
and there’s the ultimate beauty of eBay — accountability. you put your ass on the line, and it works or it doesn’t. granularity, baby! if you want to see granularity in action, put up some eBay auctions with good counter tools. it’ll blow your mind.