How to Lose a Car in 10 days...

or "how I sold my 140,000 mile car for Blue Book* in ten days".

Part 3 - running the auction

You can almost immediately guage whether there is ANY interest in your car by looking at the number of "watchers" on your auction. Some of the watchers will be buyers, some may be trying to sell similar vehicles and are simply interested in seeing the price yours sells for. In any case, this is a completely different scenario to the paper rags where you wait for the phone calls to come in... and wait... and spend all your time dealing with lookie-lu's. The second huge benefit is that you can also tell whether there are any REAL BUYERS out there. Set a reserve and set the starting price low (I started mine at $200) and bids will start to come in. It won't sell until it meets the reserve but I knew it had a chance of selling when it hit $1000 on the second day.

The nail-biter comes in the last day, last few hours or even minutes as the last few bidders outbid each other in a race to win the auction (mine shot up from $2000 to $3000 in the last day), leaving me glad I'd turned down an on-the-spot cash offer of a few hundred dollars less.

So now I was capturing people searching in Google for "Golf GTI", buyers searching in eBay for "black cars", "golf GTI's", "VW's in San Diego"... and so on. I had already set the stage for the sale with detailed pictures and a description and it sold in 10 days above the reserve and for the price I was hoping for.

Plus only one person asked to come look at it and test drive it! Can you get better than that? I never posted my phone number anywhere I didn't have to deal with an interminable stream of calls for me to explain more about the car in the evening and at work; I only spoke to this one person over then phone. Plus the few questions that were asked through the eBay "ask the seller a question" which emails you the questions could also be added to the auction so that all the other buyers could see the answers. Imagine trying to do this if you've been called by 20 people and there was something new you wanted to tell them about the car.

Another benefit of eBay with their feedback system is that you can weed out the complete lusers by requiring a certain level of positive feedback before somebody can bid. I did allow zero feedback (but not negative) in case somebody joined eBay just to buy my car (in which case they would start out with 0 feedback). Since I was hoping to capture buyers who may not already be eBay users I didn't want to rule them out.

How I sold my car on eBay part 4

*Reference to the Kelley Blue Book - trademark of Kelley Blue Book co. kbb.com. This car sold between the trade-in and private sale price given by Kelley Blue Book.