Vintage view: Online goods

When competing for an item in an online auction, you can use a bidding service which will place your highest bid in the final seconds of the sale, giving you a much better chance to nab a bargain.

Buying and selling antiques online, outside of a straight purchase from a retailer with an online presence, is generally an auction situation with bidding against all comers. Let’s look at Ebay, the largest of the online auction hosts.

Listing any item involves joining Ebay (free for private individuals) and paying a fee to Ebay for inserting (listing) and selling (final value fees) for each item. It’s free to list items as a private seller if you start the bidding at a price of 5c to €1.49 without a reserve.

When your item sells, 10% of the final value goes to Ebay. Further expenses include enhancing your page with images and buyer formats, and the use of electronic payments through PayPal if you are a trade seller rather than a private seller (where it’s free).

Beyond that, both buyers and sellers must protect their very public Feedback — a sort of credit rating shown in a score and reviews. The Feedback demonstrates you are an honest vendor with quality goods, and/or a buyer who pays up and is easy to manage.

The quality of the page on which you advertise something for sale can be enhanced by using photographs with a ‘zoom’ feature; as a shop window, it’s important to list the item in the right categories and show it off to its best.

One photograph is free for your page, and every subsequent picture, 15c. These media fees can creep up depending on what you want, but for a high ticket item, it’s well worth the extra investment. Supersize images hosted for a month, for example, are €2.70 each, peanuts if you’re offering a Georgian tea set for a few hundred.

You can list the item in more than one category to widen the hits when viewers search the site (putting something like an old saddle under Equestrian and Antiques for example).

From the time the item is listed on Ebay, all communications with interested parties should now be channelled through the site, and that includes all emailing. This protects you from nuisance strangers, reduces the potential for fraud, and reassures Ebay that they will get their cut. As a buyer, you can search for articles, examine them using the posted photographs and contact the seller for extra detail and information on, for example, the cost of postage, something for which the buyer is solely responsible unless it’s offered free by the vendor.

Ebay has a number of buying systems that include:

* Auction: This terminates at a set time on a set date. Bids escalate in set increments and will keep going until the Maximum Bid of every bidder is reached by the auction’s end. There may or may not be a reserve, and the page will tell you when the reserve price has been met.

There are bidding services which will place your highest bid in the final seconds of the auction, giving you more of a chance to nab something. It’s often worth including a bid even 50c in addition to your top bid in the hope this may just pip the other bids to the post. Once a winning bid is made and the auction over, the buyer is in a contract to buy the piece, and failing to come up with a payment within three to four days without explanation can lead to a formal conflict process on Ebay that may result in damaging Feedback or expulsion from the site.

n Buy it Now: This reflects the seller’s best hopes and can take the piece instantly off the table. Buy it Now is very popular for antiques and good quality collectibles where the seller doesn’t want to be messed around with low bids when they have something they consider highly desirable.

Don’t assume that the Buy it Now price is fair and reasonable. It’s often just the opinion, belief or strategy of the seller to kick that price up.

Private sellers will also just chance their arm that an unwitting viewer will panic and buy the piece without researching its real value. Buy it Now items are charged at 50c for an insertion fee.

n Best Offer: Here you can vouch for the piece without revealing the figure to anyone but the vendor. The vendor can accept or reject the offer within 48 hours, after which it’s off the table. Best Offer is often present with a Buy it Now, but if you want to be sure to get the piece, just pay the full asking price. For the seller, this is a useful discreet method of getting serious offers, but it’s important that they check the Feedback of those offering, as rogue buyers can waste time and may not care if their Feedback score is devastated by not completing the purchase.

Obviously, when participating in this kind of distance selling, honesty is vital. If something is damaged in any way, the damage must be recorded. If not, expect its return, postage costs charged to you, and a disgruntled buyer with their eyes and venomous fingers trained on your Feedback score.

Keep in mind that shipping of delicate items, especially overseas, requires careful packing, and that you will be expected to have your postage costs in place when listing.

For more on buying or selling on Ebay, go to: www.ebay.ie/help.