When should this auction end?

I know there’s been A LOT of talk about this subject, even entire eBooks filled with rhetorical answers to this simple question. And yes, IT IS a simple question, and anyone with a little common sense will find the right answer. It’s right there, buried in our own lives!

The first clue to the answer is quite evident: to buy things on eBay, you need to have money. And to have money (apart from selling on eBay), you have to work.

Most of us do work a full-time job, a nine to five as Dolly calls it. Not everyone works on a computer and those who do may not have an Internet access (or the system administrator may have denied access to sites like eBay). And even the lucky ones who do work on a computer and can access eBay during work hours may just not have the time or the opportunity to do so.

If you’re like me, I hardly have time to check my email in the morning, before leaving to work, let alone bid on an eBay item.

So this leads me to a first conclusion: an auction that ends before 6 PM is more than likely an invisible auction to me.

But then, when I leave my workplace at 6 PM, I won’t be home in the next 5 minutes. Most of us are commuters and usually, I won’t be home before 6:30 PM.
If you have a spouse and/or children, you know you just can’t drop in front of the computer and start surfing. And you don’t want to! Now is the moment for some quality time with your children/girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife.

And you may want to eat something, don’t you?

Finally, it’s about 8 PM and now I have some time for myself. That’s when I’ll sit in front of the computer, check emails and pay a visit to eBay. But I won’t stay long because there’s a good movie that’s about to start on TV! After that, I may or may not check my emails one last time but that’s about all.

So if you want ME as a customer (and I really don’t believe I am the only one in the situation I just described), your auctions need to end between 8 PM and 9 PM.

As a seller, I try to schedule my listings in such a way that, every day, there’s one ending at 8:30 PM and another one at 8:45 PM. I found that this schedule is what works best for me. I keep enough presence on eBay to be able to drive potential customers to my eBay Store (2 auctions a day and 10-days listings mean a constant base of 20 auctions, nicely spread across the eBay search results) and my auctions rarely end without bidders.

Give this method a try, you may find it works for you too!