Add Fixed-Price Selling to Your Auctions with Buy It Now

eBay's Buy It Now (BIN) option lets you add a fixed-price option to your auction listings. The way BIN works is that you name a fixed price for your item; if a user bids that price, the auction is automatically closed and that user is named the high bidder. Note, however, that the BIN price is active only until the first bid is placed. If the first bidder places a bid lower than the BIN price, the BIN price is removed and the auction proceeds normally.

Why would you add the BIN feature to your auction? I find that many sellers who use BIN are retailers with a large quantity of similar inventory. That is, they're likely to place the same item up for auction week after week; in this scenario, the BIN price becomes the de facto retail price of the item.

You might also want to consider BIN around the Christmas holiday, when buyers don't always want to wait around seven days to see whether they've won an item; desperate Christmas shoppers will sometimes pay a premium to get something now, which is where BIN comes in.

You activate BIN when you're creating your item listing, in the Selling Format section of the Describe Your Item page, as shown in Figure 16.1. Just enter your BIN price into the Buy It Now Price box. And remember: Your BIN price should be higher than your Starting Price.

Figure 16.1. Enter a BIN price when creating an auction listing.

Know, however, that using the BIN option costs more than running a traditional auction. Adding a Buy It now price to your auction will cost

• an additional $0.05 for a BIN price between $0.01 and $9.99

• an additional $0.10 for a BIN price between $10.00 and $24.99

• an additional $0.20 for a BIN price between $25.00 and $49.99

• an additional $0.25 for a BIN price over $50.00.