Prime Time

People often wonder what times of day or days of the week offer the lowest prices on Beezid items.  This blog post is going to try to help answer that question by looking at the prime bidding times.

Beginners, and even experienced bidders, often wonder if certain items sell at lower prices at different times of the day or days of the week.  To try to come up with an answer, I’ve analyzed data from the past three months of auctions, from the beginning of July to the beginning of October.  I chose to focus on $100 Gift Cards as these are fairly frequent and should have a good sampling of data.  My data consists of 323 auctions from the given time period.  For each auction, I looked at the final Sales Price and the Closing Date of the auction.  One final note:  All times/dates are based on Pacific Time as that is my time zone and I prefer to view data in a way that helps me.  🙂  Sorry for those on the East Coast (or elsewhere) that need to do some slight conversions.

So, let’s look at how the average Sales Price varied by the Day of the Week alone.

Not surprisingly, Fridays and Saturdays tend to have higher prices.  What is surprising is how high the auction prices on Wednesday seem to be.  Also, note how low the sales prices are on Sundays and Mondays.

Now let’s take a look at how Sales Price varied by Time of Day.  For this metric, I split the day out into six segments of four hours each and took a look at the numbers.  Here they are.

As expected, the late night/early morning hours tend to give the best prices.  However, you may not have expected that the highest prices are during the work day!  So, for those of you who only come home and bid after work, never fear!

Putting this all together, you should combine the best days of the week with the best times of day and you’ll find auctions that close at much lower prices than average.  For this sample data, the average sales price from 12:00 AM – 4:00 AM Sunday was $5.66 compared with $13.22 from 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM on a Wednesday.

Also, keep in mind, that knowing when an auction is going to close is key to your success.  If you can anticipate that certain times/days will have auctions closing at lower prices, you can take that into account in your bidding by jumping in a bit earlier than normal or by watching the auction closely when the price is lower than what you would normally pay attention to.  Similarly if the auction seems like it will close at a higher than normal price, you can avoid the auction until later in the bidding and save yourself some bids.

As usual, any comments or feedback are definitely welcome!