I wrote earlier about my friend with the Mustang asking about reserve prices. He asked whether to make it available to those who ask, and whether he should lower it, and if so, when? In fact, lowering your reserve is a powerful way to re-connect with your bidders near the end of the listing.
In most cases on eBay, if you're going to change anything at all about your listing it must happen before the last 12 hours of the auction. In fact, if your item has bids you can't even end an auction within the last 12 hours. One exception to this is on eBay Motors only. Motors allows you to lower your reserve within its vehicle category within the final 12 hours of the listing. Either way, you should lower your reserve before the 12 hr. limit to get the greatest benefit.
So when is the best time to do this and how much should you lower it?
Most listings ramp up in activity right after their launched. Then they level off and pick up again in the last few hours. During the quiet middle time people come and go, many of the initial bidders are outbid and may just lose interest. If you've started your listing with a low price you'll likely have lots of bidders under the reserve price. How can you get their attention again? Lower your reserve.
When you lower the reserve price a couple of things happen.
- You get a little icon next to the price which says "Reserve Price Lowered" - that tells potential buyers you're really anxious to sell this item.
- eBay emails all of your bidders and tells them the seller (you) have lowered the reserve on the item they were bidding on.
So, by lowering your reserve you get eBay to do a little last-minute marketing for you. That's another reason to set starting prices low and encourage people to bid. Get lots of bidders and then when there's about 24 hours left, Lower Your Reserve.
How much do you have to lower the reserve price?
That's another cool thing. You can lower it $1 if you want, and the emails still go out as if you'd slashed prices by 50%. It was my policy to lower the reserve on everything. The bidders can't see how much you'd lowered it, and they still can't view your reserve price - which is another reason for not giving the reserve price out when asked.
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