Revelation of the day: I’m an eBayer ahead of my time

One of the tricks on eBay is to repackage the item you’re selling. Be this through the description you give, or the freebies that you throw in to make it seem like there’s more of a bargain to be had in comparison to what else is up for grabs.

I thought that there might be another way to increase the value of what I was trying to sell; the feel good factor.

Ultimately this is why we like to laugh. It makes you feel good, better about things; it’s therapeutic for the soul. When I bought my CD, this is what I thought it would deliver. So I thought that the sort of people that might be interesting in buying the same CD from me might also be up for magnifying this feeling for themselves by donating to charity. I wanted to set up an auction whereby if you placed a bid but didn’t win, you could choose to donate the amount you’d ‘pledged’ to a charity – the Make a Wish foundation (a charity that tries to help kids with life-threatening diseases feel better about life for a short while by making a wish come true). As an added incentive to increase bids, I would promise that if I won the challenge we were set I’d donate my winnings to the same charity. This then got me thinking about the last challenge set and the idea of trust online, so I decided that I’d promise to email all bidders the outcome of the auction and provide proof of the charity donation.

In order to spread the word about what I was trying to do I thought about seeding my intentions in one of the eBay chat rooms and also contacting the original seller to see if he would be willing to direct people to my auction (as there’d be ‘free’ advertising involved for him as the sound of laughter CDs are his business). One of the most popular you-tube videos at the moment is a baby laughing so I thought that it could be worth contacting the person who posted it and seeing if I could ‘advertise’ with them (see you-tube link on this page for video).

Sounds interesting right?

Unfortunately it seems I’m an eBayer ahead of my time.

The functionality just isn’t in place to enable this sort of auction yet, although I think that eBay are missing a huge opportunity here. There is a way that you can donate to charity – there are charity auctions where the highest bid gets donated to charity, and options for the seller to donate part or all of his ‘winnings’ to charity. The appeal of what I was thinking was in its simplicity. The bidder wouldn’t have to go to a separate site to donate, or enter credit card details if they had paypal (the downside of directing them to another site such as justgive.com).

In the end I ran out of time to think of a way to make this work.

So on to plan B and the idea that key to an auction is getting your timing right. Now in a ‘traditional’ sense this is how long your auction should last, when people are online surfing etc. But I wanted to see if I could take this one step further and make the product itself time-sensitive. With April Fool’s Day fast approaching I thought that there was an opportunity to re-package the sounds of laughter CD as canned laughter that you could use to get back at a serial practical joker with (although I was a bit worried about repositioning someone’s livelihood as canned laughter so decided that I would have to think carefully about the image I’d use). I thought that I could encourage a fast sale using the ‘Buy it now’ option as if I sold my item before Friday at midday I’d worked out that I would be able to guarantee that they would get it delivered before April Fool’s day.

Again, the best laid plans….

In my eBay infancy I didn’t realize that you could only use ‘Buy it now’ if you had a certain number of ratings, or if your account was set up in a particular way.

So you’ll now find my item on eBay as a canned laughter CD with the incentive of a FREE loveable toy fish ((doesn’t everyone like a cuddly toy – just think back to the Generation Game cheer) to make you (or probably your kids) smile a bit more)). I decided to pay for an extra listing as I think people might search under jokes/pranks as well as CD (I didn’t find the eBay list suggestions particularly helpful – why anyone would search under ‘soft rock’ for this is a bit of a mystery).

Current status: No bids. Aution number 150107247044
Shame. I had such high hopes. And I could have been making eBay history.