1 Pound No Reserve Promotion between now and Christmas

[greenmasons]

I've just mentioned this in the Marketing Challenge but this is a good place to bring it up to.
I think the £1NR would be an excellent feature to have running during the slow times of the year like January, February and September. It could bring in some much needed additional trade (and publicity!).

[ToyCrazyUK]

I now have a banner! Thanks to greenmasons and their YDC auction:

[ToyCrazyUK]

I've just mentioned this in the Marketing Challenge but this is a good place to bring it up to.
I think the £1NR would be an excellent feature to have running during the slow times of the year like January, February and September. It could bring in some much needed additional trade (and publicity!).

I agree. I've posted a note on the website suggestions forum to see if we could make it permanent by having a flag on the auction listing and a special search for them

[ToyCrazyUK]

With 155 auctions and growing, I thought it might be a good time to get plugging! Local papers always seem desperate for something to print, so if we all contacted our local papers with details of the auctions, we might get eid mentioned a few times.

I'm not that good at wording myself, can anyone put together a brief 'press release' that we could use? I thought if we mentioned a particular item which will rouse people's interest - we could each put our 'star item' in our details - eg mine is the walkera genius helicopter which is retailing at £99 on Ama$0n. So we'e got a nice short url to quote, we could use nyk's www.ebid1.co.uk url.

[ToyCrazyUK]

Remember, we want all items to look like a bargain at £1 NR and not actually worth £1. We want buyers to search through the items and think WOW, look at all these bargains, I must come back and look regularly to see all the new bargains!

[cmjewels925]

I think the £1NR would be an excellent feature to have running during the slow times of the year like January, February and September. It could bring in some much needed additional trade (and publicity!).

While the £1NR promotion is a good idea and, as you say, could attract trade during slow periods, I think there should be some guidelines for it.

As eBid already have a £1 Bargain Basement sub-category in the Whatever's Left section, I envisaged this promotion more as a way to get some bidding wars started and generate more interest in the site. While there are some fantastic bargains to be had if you search under 1NR, I'm concerned that people hearing of this promotion are going to have a quick look, see a lot of £1-£3 items and leave again without seeing what's actually available. As Toys said, she has a helicopter listed which is selling on Amazon for £99 and there are plenty of other exceptional bargains there but you have to look for them rather than them jumping out at you.

To illustrate this, I've done a break-down of the 157 items listed so far

no bin/value <£2.00 16
bin £0.99 - £1.50 47
bin £1.51 - £2.00 37
bin £2.01 - £2.50 7
bin £2.51 - £3.00 1
bin £3.01 - £4.00 1
bin £4.01 - £5.00 1
bin £5.01 - £75.00 30
no bin/value >£5.00 17 (includes items where bin is no longer available due to bids being placed)

Please, don't anyone get upset or feel insulted; I'm not saying there's anything 'wrong' with your auctions, I just don't think they're going to get people excited about the possibility of getting a better bargain here than on any other auction site.

[greenmasons]

I must admit i'm guilty of the Bid @ £1 and BIN @ £2. The PC software i'm selling has an RRP of £4.99 in the 1NR promotion, making the £1 bid seem really good value!

The problem is auction sites are seeing a trend where customers are more and more likely to use BIN to get an item straight away rather than hanging around. That's not me guessing its actually been researched and hence why eBay is moving more and more into Shops rather than traditional auctions (will find a link to where i saw it!). If my items were £1 NR and £4.99 BIN I could see some new buyers seeing them, wanting the item straight away but the £4.99 tag results in them heading back to eBay where competition is extremely stiff in the Software categories.

At least the £1NR, £2BIN makes it excellent value whether you Bid or Buy and i can directly compete with my opponents on the other side.

I really like the £1NR idea Its something we can shout about to the whole World....
I agree its not worth having a £1NR for an item worth £1...Customers would vote with their feet and find the item somewhere else for £1 BIN. But i do believe anything worth at least £2 is still a bargain to be had at £1. This is especially true on eBid where at the moment some items may only see 1 or 2 bids so it probably won't reach £2 anyway

This is not a moan/criticism because I really enjoy taking part in the eBid community events, etc

Maybe if i put in the auction description RRP £4.99 that would create a better idea of the bargain the item is?

[*artsbanquet*]

Maybe if the BIN price is for eg, £1.50, the BIN should be left out altogether. Just put £1NR and start the auction at £1.00 - let the item find its own price. The BIN price can still stay for higher value items so that browsers can see the savings they are making?

Or maybe for this £1NR promotion, it should strictly be for auction-type listings and there should be no BIN price at all to avoid confusion.

Before publicizing, maybe we should reach some sort of concensus or have some guidelines on this.

Also, is this an an ongoing promotion or is there going to be a specified time limit - having an expiry date on the promotion might encourage buyers to buy more urgently.

[ToyCrazyUK]

I was hoping we might make it permanent, but initially we could say the promotion is between now and Christmas, to see if it does actually bring in more buyers.

The reason I included a BIN option is so that they auctions could get picked up on google base if they have a decent run length.

greenmasons has a point in saying that a lot of people want to BIN and a low BIN could still be a bargain. Also with the BIN, with Christmas coming, bidders may ot wish to risk not winning the auctionans may want to BIN.

What does everyone else think? To a certain extent, we sellers have to use our initiative and conscience in deciding whether a buyer would look at their items and think that £1 start is a bargain. We all want to promote our items as much as possible, but we have to ask ourselves before we list each item 'would this enhance the choice of 1NR auctions, or could a buyer see the list and not return?' If we get this promotion right and the buyers think there a loads of bargains to be had, they will return and will also hopefully browse the other auctions.

[greenmasons]

It didn't even cross my mind about taking the BIN out completely LOL But it has now!