For sellers who constantly have to put up with bid snipers,
non-paying bidders and other anti-social, timewasting buyers,
eBay's 'pre-approved buyer' feature is a godsend.
Pre-approving buyers lets you choose in advance who you're going
to allow to bid: not by banning people you don't want, but by
explicitly allowing people you do want. Anyone who is not on the
pre-approved list will have to email you and ask you to let them
bid.
While that might sound great, it's only really a good idea to do
it on very, very high value items. After all, half the point of
eBay is that it's such an open marketplace - if you're going to
restrict bidding to a few people, why not just email them to
offer the item?
Most buyers will be very upset if they come across an item that
they need to be pre-approved to bid in. They almost certainly
won't have heard of the rule before, and they'll think this 'new
feature' (it must be new if they've never heard of it, right?)
is absolutely terrible. The one time I required pre-approval for
an item, someone actually wrote to eBay to complain about the
auction's format - as if eBay had nothing to do with letting me
list that way! The chances are that almost no-one will ever
email you asking to be included in the auction - they'll go
somewhere else instead.
Of course, it'd be better if you could just require that bidders
have a minimum feedback level, but then that might overly
restrict the choices of new buyers, and make them less likely to
buy anything to begin with. There's a delicate balance at play
between trust and openness, and pre-approval tends to violate
it. If one of your regular buyers wants to bid on your item only
to find out they weren't pre-approved, the chances are they'll
be more than a little offended at your lack of trust.
The only situations in which you might find an advantage in
pre-approving bidders are if your auctions get consistently
disrupted. Jokers sometimes bid millions because they think it's
funny, or people bid high and then don't pay as a protest
against whatever you're selling - this is a pain to deal with.
Requiring approval makes sense on very high-ticket items simply
because it shows the buyer is serious about wanting to buy.
Before you can restrict an item to pre-approved buyers, you have
to list it and get an item number. You can then set up
pre-approved bidding on this page:
http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?PreApproveBidders>htt
p://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?PreApproveBidders. From
there on, it's a simple process - just type the usernames of the
people whose bids you want to accept, and then keep checking
your email.
Remember, though, that you don't need to restrict your auction
to pre-approved bidders to keep people you don't like from
bidding on your auctions. You can simply cancel these buyers'
bids when they appear, and then use eBay's 'block bidder'
function to ban them from bidding on any of your auctions again.
Edit your block list here:
http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?bidderblocklogin>http
://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?bidderblocklogin.
In the next email, we'll take a look at whether your eBay design
is as effective as it could be.
About the author:
Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from
Nashville, TN. Visit
http://www.auctionseller411.com/ for more
great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online
auctions.
