Reputation Matters
My grandparents recently moved to New Mexico from California and they had to get rid of a lot of their belongings first. Not only did they need to pare down in order to fit into a smaller place, but also in order to raise some cash to finance their trip to the Southwest. Like most old folk, they’re on a fixed income and don’t have the extra funds to stay in motels, pay for gas, and certainly not to rent a storage unit to stash what won’t fit in their vehicle.
First, they invited their children to come to their house and take anything they wanted. They wanted to make sure that anyone who had their eye on a piece of furniture or cherished heirloom need not wait until probate to inherit it. Unfortunately for them, no one came and no one expressed interest in any items that they were willing to part with.
If they were in the Dallas/Forth Worth metroplex, I would have recommended they come to Easysale. As an Easysale Ambassador, I would have earned a cool $30 myself for the referral. Because there aren’t any similar services in their old area, I asked them if they had ever considered listing their items on eBay.
My grandparents are pretty tech-savvy. They at least know how to operate a digital camera, upload images, and use eBay’s interface. Though they have never sold anything before, they have an okay reputation from making 4-5 purchases a year and promptly sending their payment. This is chump change in a market where people run entire businesses on eBay, shipping hundreds of goods a month in what amounts to a full-time job; still, the lack of negative feedback and longevity of their account should inspire some confidence.
Their impression was that unless you have a solid reputation, it’s not worth listing items for sale. This was something they picked up from talking to peers and also from their own buying habits. My grandfather pointed out that he doesn’t bother with auctions (preferring the buy it now button) and passes over cheaper items that lack the professional layout of established businesses.
People like him are fairly common in an arena that depends on trust and confidence to make up for the lack of brick-and-mortar reliability. The recent changes at eBay have made things even more difficult for amateur merchants to enter the fray, especially if lots of time passes between transactions.
Saying nothing of the professional appearance and dedicated response times, how much can a high reputation like one afforded by using Easysale actually affect the success of an online auction sale? A field experiment published in the Journal of Experimental Economics (“The value of reputation on eBay: A controlled experiment,” Vol. 9, #2, Jun 2006) confirms my grandfather’s suspicions, almost. A randomized and controlled field experiment compared sales of identical item batches between new seller identities compared with an established seller with high feedback points.
Predictably, the high-feedback user performed better. The study found a difference of 8.1% of the selling price in buyer’s willingness-to-pay. Just another reason to trust your eBay listings to a professional!
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