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Hi everyone!
I picked up a duck call tonight at an auction. It is a niche collecting market, but identifiable duck calls can go for big money–well into 4 figures. So I am posting it here and I invite you to research out or guess a price that you would put on it for your 30 day listing to “set it and forget it.”
https://imgur.com/gallery/ryXeT
Now the reason I am really posting is to try and change everyone’s perspective on auctions. I actually called in twice to the voicemail trying to make this point, but failed. So this item presents a good opportunity for me to make my point–auctions are a tool in your tool bag, and there are circumstances where you should use them.
Don’t read further before thinking of your guess…my research will bias you.
This item is the prime example of when I use an auction. I have something now that comes up a dead end on research. It’s a known Arkansas call maker, but I could not find a sale on either eBay or Worthpoint. Someone on a duck caller forum has one for sale at $138, and marked sold–no picture.
There’s an article on another forum that has 3 pictured…none look like mine. I know from experience that the type of label used dates this call to the 1950s–so it was done late in his life. Arkansas duck calls range from 1400 to about $200 for known makers on ebay.So I could put it at $1000 – $1400 and forget it. But what if this is the rarest one ever and it’s actually worth $2000? Short of contacting an expert, there’s no way of knowing. And I friggin hate it when something sells minutes after posting–even if it is for a huge profit. It is my suggestion that when you run into a dead end like this, you should use auctions. My initial price I set at the SAME PRICE I would have if I were “setting and forgetting.”
So in this case, I will be running an auction with a start tag of $250, because that is the price that I think would be a fair Buy It Now. If the auction runs and I get no bids, I will simply re-list as 30 day at the same price (I don’t use auto-renew because I like to diagnose problems). If you need a bit more proof that this is a common practice, consider that ebay even provides you a button that automatically changes them from auctions to 30 day–the “Relist as Fixed Price” button. And it puts your auction opening price in as your BIN price!
You guys will be able to see what happens if you want when I list it tomorrow–it will be the only Leker duck call up I’m sure. Will I lose money by using an auction? Probably a little bit. But I much prefer that to selling a 30 day literally minutes after I posted it and knowing that I lost money from under-pricing.
TL;DR Use auctions when your research can’t provide you with an accurate price. Set your auctions at the same price you would a BIN 30 day.
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Heather who is “The Paper Castle” on youtube uses this technique quite a bit, and it seems to be working well for her.
I just tried it with a higher end needlepoint kit – the auction ends in a few days. Already have a bid for the opening price (which I would be very happy with), but hoping for a bidding war. Either way, there’s nothing to lose with this approach, and the chance to gain.
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Instead of listing at a $250 starting auction bid, why not list for $2000 BIN with “make offer”.
With an auction, you’re setting the lowest price you’ll take and hoping for more. Maybe buyers will get into a bidding war and push the price up. But you could just sell it at opening bid of $250.
With BIN + Make Offer, you’re setting your high price and willing to negotiate down. You get buyers making blind offers so you can see were the market is. You also dont have to accept any offer. As the seller, you have much more control.
Since you do have knowledge of this item, seems strange to hope the right buyers are online during your 5-10 day auction. At your auction house, I bet it happens that a really cool item will sell really cheap because the right buyers dont happen to be there that night.
If the goal is to just move items, then auctions make sense. I bet 1 in 50 auctions get a lucky bidding war. But if you’re trying to maximize the profit, then setting the high price up front seems smarter. It’s just the fast nickel vs slow dime argument.
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I sold a much cheaper Rhodes turkey call a few weeks ago. I had never seen something like it, and it sold fast. I listed it at the going price.
As much as Jay and Ryanne don’t like auctions, they do have use for them occasionally. You can check out the Podcast here:
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We will never live that one sale down. It’s been burned into scavenger history 🙂
But as a normal, everyday strategy, I don’t see auctions as smart. We regularly buy from an eBay seller who seems to clean out estates. He puts up all items at a starting bid of $5-$10. We have sniped so much stuff from him at ridiculously low prices because other bidders didn’t happen to be online. So I like his auctions.
I guess if you use them really strategically where you maximize the chance of a bidding war, then that’s useful. I just know when we used to try auctions, it was always a bad feeling when we sold a cool item at opening bid. I dont like that feeling of powerlessness.
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Jay, you bring up a topic that has interested me and I am hoping you might elaborate: how do you search out the auctions on ebay that are like what you just mentioned? People have mentioned this strategy here on the forum a few times and I just wondered what key words you might use. Of course if that is not something you wish to share then I would understand since that would open the door to other people bidding against you. (c:
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It’s no secret. Just start cruising eBay and look for volume sellers who seem to list hundreds of items at a time. We find these sellers when doing research on gew gaws.
Often these sellers have 100k+ feedback and even say in their bio that they are an estate company.
Buying off eBay to sell on eBay is a very small part of our sales. Just a fun way to find stuff. Because of shipping costs, its always better to buy stuff in person IMHO.
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Ok, so that’s what I’m saying Jay. So now you said set my BIN at $2000…where did you get that number? There is still a possibility that it is worth way more and that it will sell immediately at $2000.
Sometimes there is no way of knowing the correct upper limit to some items, especially when dealing with niche collecting groups like duck calls or denim jackets. (I was actually a person who called in during the denim jacket incident to try and explain this.) Because the collectors are aggressive and watch the eBay listing closely, you lose the chance to let the market determine the price.
Back to your $2000 BIN. If you truly think that is the price to set the piece at, then what harm is done by running it for one week as an auction, with a $2000 start. If you get only one bid, you get your $2000 still. But if you were wrong, then you haven’t missed the opportunity to get $3000 or $4000. And all you have to do after the week is click the “Relist as Fixed Price”.
I know this to be an effective tool. I do not use it often, maybe 5% of the stuff I buy falls into this category, and I buy old, weird stuff. If every item in your store has a label or UPC, this is not for you. But the number of times I have been pleasantly surprised and received multiple bids on an item that I thought was at maximum value is astonishing.
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I picked $200 because of what you said: “So I could put it at $1000 – $1400 and forget it. But what if this is the rarest one ever and it’s actually worth $2000? ”
I guess if you start the auction at your upper limit, then you’re correct: you aren’t losing out. Its a no-risk auction.
Our strategy of pricing high on items with Make Offer is tried and true. Every week we sell items with this method at higher prices than most sellers historically get for the same item.
For those of you who preach this auction strategy, I’d love to actually see some sales where you used it and it worked. The logic of your hypothesis makes sense, but does it sell? Without real sales, it seems like a waste of time. Can you share some sales where you listed an auction at your upper limit…and then there was a bidding war and it sold for much more than you thought?
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Thanks for the analysis, Kenny. I’m doing that right now with a rarer Swatch watch. Jay we’re with you for BIN as an everyday strategy and I use it sometimes in situations like Kenny describes. If it might be worth $2000 just put it up for that and wait to see what happens. But it is harder for me because my store is small enough that I’m well aware of the items that have been sitting for a while. I lose patience. It’s really hard to list it and forget it with a smaller number of items active at a time so I end up doing a variation on the Dutch auction. After a couple months I’ll keep dropping the price on items I think are pie in the sky. I do stick to my guns when I have confidence in my price.
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The key to “list it and forget it” is the “FORGET IT” part.
If you are monitoring items and stressing about them, then you should use strategy of updating the price/info every 30 days because you’re trying to sell fast. Someone had a cool name for that strategy. Like “List it and Tend to it”.
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Kenny, a sniping strategy I use sometimes when I’m in the mood is I pick a Collectibles or Antiques subcategory I feel like browsing and sort for Ending Soon on the entire subcategory. I refine for Auction, and US Only. This works best on off times like early weekday mornings. I don’t bother with this on a Sunday night. I don’t use a keyword because half the fun is finding poorly titled items that have been ignored. There are tens of thousands of auctions ending every day in some of these subcategories. The odds are astronomical that you’ll be bidding against me so have at it!
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RE: Auctions, there is one other use for them which I learned from the Popeye postcard fellow: he uses his free auction listings to save on listing fees when he runs out of BIN listings.
We have a premium store and we are getting close to the 1000 items mark. I picked up a bunch of items that we are testing right now. So instead of listing and forgetting, I wanted to use my extra 500 listings to pilot these items. I priced them at the price that would be BIN but in Auction setting. In this way it does not interfere with my 1000 free listings.
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As I said, it has happened a lot for me. Here’s a sale I made in the last 90 days–a box of pencils that I would suggest not one of us would ever have had the foresight to put a $200 BIN on a box of pencils.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/222765290134
But I have another better story…in 2014, I bought a piece of folk art at an auction. I knew what it was and was prepared to empty my wallet, but no one else at the auction had any idea. I opened the bidding at $20, and won the item. It was a sand art bottle by Andrew Clemens of Iowa, dated 1880. His pieces are in museums and have been on Antiques Roadshow. This was a small piece, with boring flowers instead of eagles or trains…not his best work.
I got two professional appraisals–both said the piece was worth between $8,000-10,000. Only the eagles and trains and cool stuff sold over 5 figures I was told. I was offered $7000 cash and told I was foolish for not taking it. A BIN of $10,000 or even $15,000 would have been very reasonable.
Page thru the album for the result….
https://imgur.com/a/PoqsgThere was no way to know that was going to be the result. And I’m not convinced that I would have got that much had I put it up as BIN. I probably would have been persuaded by everyone, and accepted an offer under 10k.
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Wow! $23K!!!! Thats incredible. Huge congrats! That’s one of those rare jackpot sales. That’s must be so satisfying as a scavenger to have the eye for that item, do the research, and get all its worth.
My question: How many items like this do you find/sell each year? I know our recent vintage denim sale was extremely rare. At our level of scavenging, we’ve probably only had only had 10 items (our of 20,000) that have sold for over $1000.
My point is that I would never build a daily process out of edge cases. Because we once sold a jacket for $1000 on auction doesn’t mean we should put up every item on auction. Or even 99.999% of our items.
If your point is that auctions are good for the rare items that you think may have an extreme value, then your point is well taken. If you’re saying auctions are a smart way to list items in your daily process, then I just don’t see the business sense in that time commitment. One rare jackpot sale is not a good business case.
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Fantastic find on that Andrew Clemens sand art. I saw one at Heart of Country many years ago and I think it was priced in the $8k to $10k range. Stunning works of art.
The auction house/auctioneers where you bought the piece are a bunch of idiots, my goodness. It’s that kind of thing that leads to litigation for mishandling assets.
Your duck call is priced right on the money IMHO. One nuance it has going for it is the condition of the label, better than most.
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That was me, Jay, I suggested List It and Tend It. On that topic, though, I’ve moved from L&F (List & Forget) to L&T (List & Tend) over the past year. I started L&F and had it running until summer last year, when I got a bee in my bonnet to move all my stock into 30 days, so changed to L&T. I think I was changing my inventory system and wanted to ensure I still had all my stock.
Then in the Fall, as each item expired, I moved it all back to GTC and went back to L&F mode. This month, I started ending all my listings when they showed up on my Hub as Ending Today, so I’m going back into L&T.
Sounds odd to do all that work, but I noticed last year that I seemed to be doing more sales when I was in L&T than when I was L&F. This year’s change was triggered bc I’m SO. FED. UP. with that stupid Underperforming tab and those annoying emails telling me that I need to revise my listings. They can’t even give me suggestions because I HAVE THE ONLY ONE ON EBAY!!!! Gaaaaaaaaaaah!
Anyway, I figured that I’d shift everything to 30 days to get rid of that tab, and then do a little analysis. With a consistent listing routine (didn’t have that last year) and a store (didn’t have that before I did the shift last year, I actually shifted because I had opened a store) and an historical sales figure with (1) and (2) from this year, I figured it would give me an accurate real-time feedback of whether active listing is better or worse than passive listing.
Will report back.
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I wouldn’t say auctions should be a part of day-to-day listing, but I also would say that if you have a “I never use auctions” attitude, you may be making a mistake. I use auctions for four basic areas:
1–Items that are so rare, you cannot find anything comparable…like the denim jacket
2–Items that are subjectively valued due to condition–like ungraded baseball cards or comic books
3–Asian marked pottery–I once sold a vase in 5 mins for $500–turns out it was 17th century
4–Large groups of items where the time invested in research is too great–I just spent $5 at auction on a box of 80+ vintage trucker hats. I could research each and every hat, but it is too big a time commitment. Instead I rapid fire list them and do a 1 week auction, in case any are rare.All four cases, I would start the auction at the same price as I would have put it up as a BIN.
I think these are all valid times when NOT using an auction would be a mistake. The upside of the auction far outweighs the little bit of time you spend.
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Agreed. But all those cases are extremely rare for us.
–Most items we’ve seen before or can easily find in research.
–We don’t ever sell baseball cards or comic books. Not our bag.
–Asian marked pottery. A rare find for us.
–We’d never list things we haven’t researched. Easier to just put it to the side until we have time to deal with it.So we never say never to auctions. Auctions are just not part of our usual process. Sounds like it is for you and you enjoy it. Let’s celebrate our differences.
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I think Kenny’s original point bears repeating:
“auctions are a tool in your tool bag, and there are circumstances where you should use them.”He did not say that you should use them for every item every time.
Kenny, thanks for persisting in making your point and thus educating me about one more way to approach listing with a risk-free way of making sure I’m not missing out on a huge return. I am currently using it very successfully with some vintage rare (ie, not much info gleaned from researching) embroidery kits.
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Sorry if I came across as rude. Sonia likes to keep me honest.
I just see so many sellers use auctions in a lazy way because they dont want to do the research…hoping for a lucky jackpot score. As I said, we snipe items from these kinds of sellers more often than makes sense.
But you provided great examples of when it makes sense for you to use auctions. That $23k sale must have been a real high. Hope your fishing lure sells well.
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Thanks Kenny for sound logic and good examples. I use auctions for the low value junk that I wouldn’t buy again. I move it out of the BIN when it’s been there for a year and no one seems remotely interested. Reduce the price every other time and it starts crawling out of the store.
Also I love having the free listings, because I always go over 250, but I’m not ready for the 1000 yet.
I also will do this for a week or two if I’m unsure of the value. If there’s no interest I figure I’m free to BIN
With the good, rare stuff I stick to BIN and wait
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Hi Kenny-
I’m giving your idea a go, I will let you know what happens-https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=112897366081
– an estate sale last minute find.When I saw them, I remembered an old timer telling me once to look for tiny details in paintings and these hit the mark, they are detailed and tiny. Then I started looking at Russian Art and thought there might be something here….
Thanks again for the tip
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