The psychology of a bargain

Strapped

I've recently been selling a number of fairly low value items. I had them for sale at £10.99 BIN, or Best Offer, + P&P. I accepted BOs of £9.99 or above. When I got to the last 3 out of 35 items, I decided not to accept BOs anymore. However, you can't remove BO from a listing where you have previously accepted BOs, so I was still receiving offers and then bidders were getting the hump when I said that I was no longer accepting offers. (I'm now the only seller of these items btw).

The solution was - to put the price up. And sure enough, the last 3 sold straight away. Crazy.

OK, they may have been underpriced a little to start with, but I find it interesting that people refused to pay the BIN price of £10.99, yet were happy to pay £10.99 if it was a BO on a higher price.

Has anyone else found this? (Apologies if it's blingingly obvious to anyone else )

Greatgimp

It's called in auction parlance, the winner's curse.

cyberbob

I.ve done similar things before and then sold items. I had £70 item (BIN) up for sale for a couple of months lots of watchers but nothing. So I changed it to FreeP&P put best offer on and upped the price to cover this. It then sold within a week at 25% extra profit on what I had originally aimed for.