When To Post Your Items On An Online Auction
By Claude Bourgoin    www.mightybids.com

When marketing your items on any online auction requires you to take several factors into consideration. To ensure success of you auction, the key is to maximize the amount of bidders available at closing time. Most of the bidding on any auction will occur in the first 24 hours and on the last day with the bulk of the serious bidding happening within the last 5 minutes!

An auction is truly at its best when two or more buyers fight over your item, and they may not be online to do so at 1:00 in the morning. So listing your item is best to keep in mind who is your target buyer and when most of them are are online looking for what you're offering them.

Sales of completed items are great for clues. Each type of item you plan to list should reveal definite pattern from past sales. For example hardware and tools may get more male bidders who are looking on Saturday morning of afternoon, and Yugioh cards may get more attention from kids' right after school. Etc..

Also you may not want to have items close on Thanksgiving afternoon when most of the country is sitting down to a great meal - or in the evening on the day of a Presidential election. Contrary to this logic, Christmas morning may be a good time to have items close because many people don't have family with whom to share their day or they are not of a Christian faith. Those people would see this as a great time to sneak in a few bids. Other people may go shopping on Christmas afternoon to try to buy what they didn't receive for a gift!

Keep tabs on the major events that may affect your target market. For example, NASCAR paraphernalia will not sell during televised races, your potential buyers won't be online during the Indy 500 or any of the other televised NASCAR or Indy races so your auction may not be successful at this time, due to the lack of interest. Now say you listed your auction item ends 1 hour before or after the televised race ends or begins, what would have been an unsuccessful auction could turnout to be a winning one.

There are also many other factors to consider. The seasonality of certain products will affect the out come of your auction. Say your selling bicycle equipment and accessories in the winter or ski equipment in the summer you're not going to enjoy the success you would have had you taken into consideration the seasonality of these items. Note that it is best to post seasonal items just before there respective season begins since that is when you will find the greatest amount of motivated bidders available.

When setting up an item for auction, take into consideration your buyer and try to put yourself in potential buyer's shoes. If you do this effectively, then you will always enjoy a more positive experience and will enjoy the selling process much more, not to mention you may make more money from your auctions.
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Author, Claude Bourgoin (MBA) is an online marketing consultant and online and offline auction expert and a contributing author can be reached here for www.mightybids.com more auction information.