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By which I mean should you time your listings to end late at night? Early in the morning? On a Sunday perhaps when many more people are at home and free to do as they like, rather than on weekdays where it’s the boss who dictates when your customers can log onto eBay and when they can’t?

Just when is the best time to end your listings with a good chance of reaching the maximum buying audience possible for your goods?

Is there a best time to sell on eBay?

The answer is there is no perfect time and anything close to the “ideal” time depends on what you are selling, who you are selling to, what work those people do, and where those people live.

So if you’re selling to new mothers it’s probably not a good idea to end your listings for bibs and baby clothing in the early morning hours when potential buyers are either catching up on lost sleep or rushing to start a new day. Research shows early evening, about 7pm UK time, is a good time to target people with young children, about the time most kids begin settling down for the night.

Here are a few other tips for deciding when to end your listings, in this case where you’re aiming to reach the biggest possible audience worldwide:

• If you’re selling to an American audience, try not to end your listings early morning in the UK, when most US buyers are still in bed! Much the same goes for Aussies and New Zealanders who’ll be fast asleep when your late evening UK listings end.

• If you’re selling worldwide, meaning you can’t time your listings to suit every person in every country, aim for sales ending around 2pm UK time and accessible to most UK buyers! That way you should find your American audience either up and running or just getting out of bed, and your targets down under willing to hang on a few hours longer before closing down for the night. Yes, it will still be the middle of the night in some countries, but experience has told me those countries do not represent the average eBay seller’s most regular buyers. People in China and Japan, for example, are not the most prolific buyers on eBay, so you rarely need to cater for them specifically, time-wise at any rate.

Check times in other parts of the world at: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock where you key the current time in your own country, or you key a range of proposed UK ending times for your listings and you’ll see something like this:

That table tells me, when it’s 2pm in the UK, it’s:

10pm in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2am in Auckland, New Zealand

9am in Havana, Cuba

1am in Anadyr, wherever that happens to be.

2pm in the UK means it’s 9am in Washington DC and 6am in Los Angeles, so still quite early in many parts of the USA where many people are sleeping or making their way to work.

It’s 11pm in Melbourne, Australia where there’s still a fighting chance of people placing last minute bids on your listings, and 2am in Auckland, New Zealand where your chance of selling is all but gone.

• If you haven’t worked it out already, you can’t have it all, and there’s no chance of capturing a massive share of the American buyers and be available to the majority of potential buyers in Australia and New Zealand as your auctions draw to a close. You can have one or the other, by ending your auctions, say, 6pm in the UK when most Americans are awake, or early morning over here when most of our friends down under are waiting for the workplace clock to signal time to go home. That is unless...

Whatever you’re selling is truly rare – then most wannabe winners will make sure they’re at their computers when bidding comes to an end, making 2pm in the UK a good time to benefit early risers in America and sleepyheads down under, or...

Your product isn’t unique and it’s in plentiful supply, as well as appealing to a worldwide audience, which makes it a good idea to list it several times on eBay with closing times to suit specific countries.

Where to Turn When eBay is Slow in Helping Solve Your Problems!

Heard in an eBay PowerSeller forum today...

“If you need help fast eBay’s staff are not the best people to ask!”

I don’t think my friend whose story is relayed here actually means that eBay staff can’t or won’t answer questions, but in his case he had a problem requiring an urgent answer: in short, an eBay buyer was making his life hell with rude phone calls and even turned up at his front door to claim a refund of £4.99... plus postage!

My friend was devastated and thought the best way to deal with the problem was to contact eBay and warn them against a mass exodus of sellers if this man was allowed to remain on eBay much longer. So, the next morning he phoned and emailed eBay as well as asking “Louise” (eBay’s virtual assistant, and about as much use as a plastic fireguard) to see if anyone else had suffered similar problems. No one had or at least they weren’t admitting to it! And eBay couldn’t help either because this was a new one on them!

So my friend decided to Google for “manage abusive eBay members” and he found the answer he was looking for in eBay’s Answer Centre where members, buyers and sellers, discuss problems between themselves and suggest solutions.

The link you need is: http://tinyurl.com/23h8evx

Moving on, my friend began looking at others sites returned by Google and dealing with “manage abusive eBay members”, and he actually found several, some with emails and postings from people encountering all manner of problems and providing easy and helpful solutions for others.

Because no one person can give you a solution to every potential problem you’ll ever encounter on eBay, it’s a good idea to make a note of the sites that will provide most of the help and advice you need.

You’ll find eBay’s Answer Centre is the best place to start, or you could leave a message at the following sites where you’ll find lots of advice about running an eBay business and solving common everyday and potentially serious problems:

www.forums.ebay.com

www.auctionbytes.com

Footnote: Hopefully most of your problems will be little ones and easily solved, but if abusive communications are your concern, you’ll find a link in every message for you to report abusive and inappropriate behaviour. It’s well hidden – towards the bottom of the page – but I have used it twice and always received a speedy reply from eBay.

by Avril Harper eBay Trading Expert Avril Harper is the editor of eBay Confidential and helps new and expert eBay traders find ways to increase their eBay profits. You can sign up for her free weekly eletter here: Recent Articles by Avril Name Email

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