Friday, December 28, 2007

Auction Tricks

Here is a little trick I learned about Liquidation Auctions. I should not be telling you this. You are my competition. However, I figure, very few people will read this, and of those, few will try buying iPods, and of those that do, I will unlikely be bidding on the same exact auction away.

Lets say you have a product you want to buy from www.liquidation.com, my case is obviously iPods. I started by seeing what was available to buy. This week (being christmas, it was slow) there some 512k shuffles and 1gb and 2gb nanos. All of which were overpriced at auction, so I let them all pass. I focused on 3 batches of 30gb iPods, all of which were ending today. Morning, noon, and afternoon.

Now, how many people do you think are out there bidding on $2,000+ worth of broken iPods? Not too many. In fact, there was only three of us, and three auctions. The morning one bid up to $2,700 because all three of us bid on it. The noon one bid up to $2,700 because two of us bid on it. With the last auction of the day, I was the only person left standing willing to spend that kind of money. I won the auction for $2,400 because there wasn't any competition left. Do you know who drove the price up that high in the first place? Yes, the same three people... we were the only ones interested for the day. I have done the same thing on each of my other auction purchases, creating hundreds more in my profit margin.

The moral of the story, is that you should not get emotionally attached. Set your top price, and stick to it. If someone else is willing to pay more, let him. There are always more auctions to buy from. Pace yourself, and at some point you will win the auction. The same goes for Ebay. There is a reason I can sell a 4gb nano for $115, and another one won't even make my reserve price. It's called timing. They drove up the price on themselves.

The other moral, and true trick, is to focus on the auctions that are at the end of the day. Let everyone else fight it out, when they leave for the day, you can get the real deal. the same goes for EBay auctions. There is a reason I will only sell in the morning, and that i called competition. by 8pm at night, people are watching TV, doing homework, or even bought their product for the day. Morning sales bring in more than 20% over comparable evening sales, in my experience.

In a nutshell, Sell in the morning, Buy at night.

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