What Is The Best Time Of Day To Sell On eBay?

This is a question that we often ask ourselves in my business. Choosing the right time to sell your product on eBay can make a big difference to your final selling price.

If you are using tools like eBay’s Turbolister, or Selling Manager, you will most often choose when to list your items, thereby controlling when your items finish.

This article looks at the basics in deciding what the best time to sell your product in eBay is, with a few helpful hints thrown in as well.

Starting out

If you are only just getting started you need to think a little about your target customer demographic:

• What age group are they in?
• Are they male or female?
• Where will they have Internet access from (work, home or both)?
• Are they advanced internet users (broadband, fast PC?)?

Answering these question as best you can will help to determine exactly what your demographic’s online buying habits might be.

Maybe they are executives who like to buy in their lunch break? Or mums who do their online shopping at 10-12am after dropping the kids off at school?

Decide when the best times to list your products might be. Start listing your products based on your ‘guesstimates’ and then start thinking about testing your theory!

Finding the best time to sell

After you have been selling for a while it is time to test and evaluate!

This is the boring part, but the most important.

• Step 1 – Ty selling at some different times
  • If you sell all of your items between 7 and 9pm at night, change your finishing times for 1 week of sales (if you sell in lower volumes, you might need to do some longer tests to get better data)
• Step 2 – Download your sales data
  • eBay (or your other listing software) should give you the ability to download your sales data for particular periods of time. You will need at least your sale price, sale date, sale time, and probably your item name and details to sort by.
• Step 3 – Load your data into Excel or another spreadsheet program.
• Step 4 – Sort your data by item, then by sale time.
  • Doing this will give you data sorted into item groups, and then into time groups. Each spreadsheet program will be different, but you should be able to use an ‘average’ function on your sale price data for each group of time.

When you group your sales into time blocks, and find your average sale price for that time you may start to see some interesting numbers!

We often find that our fishing items sell best early in the morning (maybe before, or at the start of a work day?) and in the evening, between 7pm and 9pm.

Our strategy is still to cover some other periods of the day however, especially for our more popular items, in higher demand.

I know a prominent baby goods seller in Australia who had determined the best hour of the day to sell all of her different types of products. She believed that she knew her buyers so well that she could target her selling times that accurately!

Helpful hints:

• If I am not selling a high volume of product and I still want to do some analysis I often divide up my days into blocks, such as Morning, Afternoon and Evening rather than looking at sales by hour. This allows me to sort through my sale data and group my item sales into broader time periods so my analysis will work.
• Don’t sell your items at lunchtime, or at dinner time. These times may vary slightly based on what eating habits are like in your own country or area, but typically these times result in poorer sales prices!
• If you sell more than one item of the same type each day, don’t sell them too close together. Spread them out, at least by an hour or more, to ensure better final selling prices.
• Try not to group all of your items too close together. Find your best selling periods, and spread your items out to give them the best chance of a high selling price!
• Experiment! Try different things, selling one item in the morning, one in evening, or maybe do a week of selling 2 items in the evening. Analyse the results after each test and refine your sales, and improve your profit!