April 23rd, 2007 by Skip McGrath

On Tuesday, April 24th, the insertion fees for Auction-style listings on www.ebay.com will only be 20¢ but watch out for the traps.

If you sell on eBay it is important to understand how to use listing sales to make more money from your eBay auctions.

The 20¢ Insertion Fee Sale starts on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 at 00:00:01 Pacific time (12:00 a.m. plus one second) and ends that same day, Tuesday, April 24, 2007 at 23:59:59 Pacific time (11:59 p.m. plus 59 seconds). Listings which were created prior to April 24, 2007 and scheduled to start during the promotional period will also be eligible for the special promotional rate.

This promotion does NOT apply to the following types of listings:

• all eBay Motors listings (including Parts & Accessories, Passenger Vehicles, Motorcycles, Power Sports, and Other Vehicles)
• International listings
• Live Auction
• Professional Services
• Real Estate
• Ad Format
• eBay Store listings.
• Some Business & Industrial categories will also be excluded

You can get all of the details at the eBay Promotion Page.

Free and discount listing days are a great deal, but you do need to be careful.  There are two big issues to watch out for:

1. When eBay has a listing sale it results in hundreds of thousands of more listings. Most eBay sellers default to a 7-day listing. If thousands of sellers do this, that means many more listings than normal will all be ending at the same time and day. So your items will have a lot more competition and probably get a lower price because of this.

2. Tuesday is the worst day to launch a listing. If you launch a 3-day listing it ends on Friday which is not a great day to end an auction. If you do a 7-day it ends on Tuesday which is also not the best day of the week (although not as bad as Friday). If you do a 10-day it would also end on a Friday. So what is left? I suggest you do a 5-day listing. This would end on Sunday which is an excellent day to end a listing and avoids the crowd that will be ending on Tuesday because of the listing sale.

When eBay has a listing sale one of the things I like to do is launch both an auction style and a fixed price listing. I run the auction listing for 5 days and the fixed price for 10 days. The advantage is double the exposure for just 20 cents more. This works best if you can use your listings to cross sell like having the Vendio or Auctiva gallery scrolling across the bottom of your auction.

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