driving prices down?

From: Mike Ford <mikeford_at_netwiz.net>
Date: Wed Apr 21 04:49:12 1999

>I just had an idea. One of the things pushing up e-bay prices
>is the publication of the high bids of past auctions. The logic
>for sellers is something like, since the previous one sold for
>this much, I should expect at least as much for this one.
>
>What if we kept (and publicized) a record of asking prices for
>the things that did *not* sell? Maybe buyers would look at that,
>and use similar logic to avoid bidding any higher than that?

If you want to drive prices down, go and hunt for the items of interest and
sell them cheap. Ebay is just supply and demand. I just sold half a dozen
items, and oversupply drove the price of three of them to levels where I
would not have accepted the final bids as offers outside of the auction
framework.

As for the list of not sellers, many people list items at a price very
close to the selling price they want, and seem pleased with perhaps as
little as half to a quarter of the items selling in a given auction cycle
(ie I have 20 widgets, every other day I list one for $9.99 (15/month),
only 1/3 sell in each cycle (5/month), so it takes 4 months to sell them
all). These are often commodity items where people only look on eBay etc.
when they really need them, and wouldn't buy otherwise unless the price was
much lower.

For example I might have 100 SCSI cables. In an absolute auction (zero
starting bids) some days they would sell for $1 each, and other days, when
a person really needs one, they might sell for more than $10. If I list
them with $9.99 first bid amounts most will not sell, but some will, and
eventually all.

In my experience NOTHING rational will keep an end user who needs something
from bidding up the price.
Received on Wed Apr 21 1999 - 04:49:12 BST