A Guide to the Different Types of Auctions on eBay
Just as the Internet has evolved and changed with time, so has the way in which you can buy and sell on eBay.
Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.
For every seller who doesn’t like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there’s another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly.
eBay tries hard to cater to all tastes. This article gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and their advantages for you.
Normal Auctions.
These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the type of auctions that everyone knows: buyers bid, others outbid them, they bid again, and the winner gets the item. Simple. And from a buyer’s perspective, the ideal opportunity to snap up a bargain. From the seller’s point of view, the opportunity to perhaps get far more for an item than they thought it was worth. Or looking on the negative side, selling an item for less than you were expecting.
Reserve Auctions.
Reserve auctions are for sellers who don’t want their items to sell for less than a certain price - a concept you’ll know about if you’re familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that the buyer will be told if their bid does not meet the reserve price you set, and they’ll need to bid again if they want the item. If no-one is willing to meet your price, then the auction is cancelled, and you keep the item. These type of auctions remove a lot of the risk from the seller’s point of view because there is no possibility of an item being sold for less than your minimum acceptable price. On the other hand, there is also the possibility of not making a sale because for whatever reason, a great many people will not bid on a reserve auction.
Fixed Price (’Buy it Now’) Auctions.
Buy it Now auctions can work in one of two ways. You can add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that buyers can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. This lets you avoid all the complications of the auction format and simply list your items for how much you want them to sell for.
Fairly recently, eBay added a twist to fixed price auctions: the ‘best offer’. What the best offer does is to allow buyers to contact you to negotiate a price, which could be a good way to get sell some extra stock at a small discount. The only downside to reserve and fixed price auctions is that you pay a small extra fee to use these formats.
In general, it is more worth using reserve auctions for higher-priced items and fixed price auctions for lower-priced ones - but remember that you can combine the two formats.
Multiple Item (’Dutch’) Auctions.
These are auctions where you can sell more than one of a particular item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around this, then I wouldn’t worry about it - everybody else does too! These auctions are very rare. Probably because the concept is a bit too hard to understand.
What is far more common when a seller has a lot of one item to sell is to list it using a combination of two auction types: a multiple-item fixed price auction. This means that the seller can just say how many of the item that they have, and offer them at a fixed price per unit. Buyers can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them.
Whichever type of auction you pick, you need to make sure that the item you’re planning on selling doesn’t violate eBay’s listing policies. While it is true you can buy and sell most things on eBay, there are some things which are not allowed.
