May 21, 2009 – 12:55 pm
A great way to increase exposure of your auctions on Trade Me is to utilize the OMINS auto-extend feature. Auto-extend keeps your auctions in a perpetual state of “closing soon”, which means they will show higher in the categories than your competitors. OMINS has supported this feature (which can be turned on or off per auction) since the beginning, and our users have been reaping the benefits for many years.
However, we’ve made some updates recently and now allow you to extend further than before. Previously, you could extend up to 7 days, but it would not extend 10 (or 14 in some categories) days due to the 25c fee involved. Now there is an option to allow you to do this, and as you’ll see below this can be beneficial in many cases.
When utilized correctly, this feature will help you reduce your overall promotion fees, and increase your overall sell-through percentage.
Example 1:
Say you had an auction set to go for 7 days with feature combo ($3.45). This works out at a cost of roughly 49c per day ($3.45/7). However, if at 7 days you extend that auction to 10 days, then you are paying only 25c for those extra 3 days (or 8.3c per day).
This means you get an extra 3 days worth of feature combo listing for only 8.3c per day, whereas if you let the auction finish and relisted, you would be paying 49c per day again. Furthermore, you will only be charged 25c if the auction reaches 7 days and needs to extend; if you sell it before this happens, then this will not be required.
You can use this cents per day equation to help decide whether it’s worth extending the auction. In short, if you would be paying more than 8c per day for the listing, then it is worthwhile allowing it to extend to the full 10 days.
Example 2:
If you have a 7 day listing with gallery ($0.55), then it’s costing you 7.8c per day ($0.55/7). This means it’s not worth extending to 10 days, as this will cost you 8.3c per day to do so. (In this case, the difference is negligable so it might still be a good idea to extend to 10 days simply to avoid creating another listing and help retain your sell-through percentage).
Example 3:
If you had a 7 day listing with gallery ($0.55) and 2x additional photos (10c each), then you would be paying 10.7c per day ($0.75/7). This means it would be quite beneficial to extend to 10 days as the additional days would only cost you 8.3c.
Summary:
In short, by our calculations, any listing that will cost you more than 58c in promotion fees should be set to extend to 10 days. If you want to increase your sell-through rate, you should also include gallery (55c) as it will only cost you a couple of cents per-listing to achieve this.
We highly recommend investigating whether the new 10-day extending support will benefit you and your auctions.
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