Do not use a reserve. Many sellers are caught out by the fees involved in doing so, and can suddenly find themselves owing eBay more than they made in sales. Leave reserves to people who know how to leverage them (and that wouldn’t include me, as I still can’t think of an example where they seem beneficial!). So do as others have said, and set the start price to the minimum you would accept.
That being said, the over-use of auctions is a pet peeve of mine. To me an auction should only be used for 2 reasons:
1) you want something sold asap and don’t care what you get for it – so you would set it at a very low start price
2) you have an item that previous sales show does better at auction than BIN – so a popular but rare item (people get excited when one becomes available, and overbid in the excitement)
Yes, an auction item set at 7 days will reappear in the search every week, but at the expense of bogging eBay down with millions of auction listings that don't sell, because they have a starting price that should be a BIN. And in my experience (I sold about 700 items over 20 years on my old account), items that only get few views don’t really benefit from auctions anyway. They are waiting for the right buyer to come along; and in that case, a google search that takes them to an active BIN listing is better then one that takes them to a long-ended auction.
Q~~_7.JPG "plpmr"){kind=avatar}
