eBay Pricing Strategies for Sellers: Setting a Reserver Price and Other Tactics

When you think about selling on e-Bay, one of the last things that usually comes to mind is pricing strategies. After all, e-Bay is an auction site. You list your item and wait for competitive bidding to drive the price up. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

Pricing the items you sell on e-Bay is an important part of the selling process, even on e-Bay. Many sellers don’t give pricing too much consideration and their auctions usually show it. I can’t tell you how many auctions I’ve come across where pricing was the major reason I didn’t bid or make a purchase.

People are looking for bargains, especially on e-Bay. They will bid only on items where they see a value for the price they are willing to pay. Naturally sellers are concerned about getting a fair price, too. Often, they have money invested in the item they are trying to sell. They can’t go below a certain price or they risk losing money.

So, how do pricing strategies work on e-Bay?

There are essentially three types of pricing you need to be concerned with:

• Starting bid
  


• Reserve price
  


• But-It-Now price
  

Each of these methods has important factors to consider.

Starting Bid

Even though each of these can be included in every auction, e-Bay only requires you to set a starting bid. The other two are optional.

You should pay particular attention to the starting bid as this will be an important factor for a buyer. Many auctions don’t get any bids just because the starting bid price is too high.

Sellers are worried that they will lose money on their items if they start the bidding too low. The wrongly believe that they won’t have enough bids to drive the price to the point where they will make a profit on the sale.

What these sellers fail to understand is that auctions – online or offline – are true indicators of the value of a particular item. People are willing to pay only what they believe the item is worth. It doesn’t matter to them what a catalog or a price guide says the item is worth.