Keep your auction private

Posted by Offer Tsuriel on February 4, 2010

Although you won’t want to make all of your auctions private, don’t hesitate to use the private auction listing options with some of your listings. The high-priced items are good candidates for private auctions as are collectibles in highly competitive markets. This may seem like count erintuitive advice based solely on research numbers. Over 76 percent of the respondents to a recent survey by AuctionBytes claimed they had never used eBay’s private auction option as a seller. Nearly 65 percent of them said they’d be less likely to bid on an item that was put up as a private auction. So why would you want to alienate potentially two-third s of your likely customer basel
Private auctions protect your bidders and your busmess. They protect your bidders, because no one can see who is participating in the auction. That doesn’t matter much if you’re selling something for $24.95, but what if you’re expecting to get $2,500 for yo ur item ? Or $25,000′ By keeping your bidders’ identities private, you’re protecting the ones who come to eBay with a good deal of disposable income and an interest in buying. If you offer them privacy, unscrupulous sellers won’t be able to harvest their lIser names and approach them with bogus offers of their own.
You’re also protecting your business at the same time you’re keeping the names of your bidders private from the criminals who want to prey upon them. Once a criminal knows who’s bidding on your expensive item, he can approach your highest bidder or your underbidder and claim that you’re selling a counterfeit. The result is that you’ll lose your cllstomers and the trust you’ve built by all of you r honest efforts. You’ll find some of your bidders are withdrawing their bids and suffering the consequences rather than risk the chance of spending a princely slim on something they no longer believe in. A cllstomer you lose to this kind of scam is one who will be difficult to regain.

Usefull tips:

• If you decide to use a pnvate auction, include an information box that explains to your bidders why your auction is private. You want to keep the potential criminals and scammers at bay, but you want your customers to know that you have good honest reasons for keeping their identities hidden.
• Remind your bidders that not only are you protecting them from potential scammers, but you’re also protecting them from revealing too much about their shopping habits. The markets most likely served by private auctions are subsets of eBay at large. Bidders are more likely to recognize each other, because they’re interested in similar items in a relatively small market. By keeping your auctions private, you let your bidders operate without revealing their current interests to your competitors.
• When using private auctions, be sure to encourage bidders to contact you via e-mail, or even through a phone call, to discuss any concerns. As in all things eBay, communication is often the kcy to mitigating suspicion and developing good customer service.
• Keep offering private auctions when they’re appropriate. Across the whole of eBay, it may take time before the average bidder recognizes the advantages of private auctions, but that learning curve will be much smaller in the niche markets. You’ll be one of the sellers helping to bring about the change in perception necessary to make private auctions more acceptable, as your bidders learn how much more protection they receive from such sales.