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Buying & Selling Websites

The Best Day to End a Website Auction Listing

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Most of my ideas for blog posts come from unresolved issues that tend to reappear in blogs and forum threads. I’m a firm believer in using numbers to make a better decision, but sometimes, numbers tell you absolutely nothing useful!

Many people had asked the question “What’s the best day to end a website auction listing?”. My theory is that with enough data, if one day was better than another for selling site, it would become clear after plotting a graph of sales by day.

Website Listings by End Day

Either

  1. I’m wrong and haven’t considered all the factors (e.g. auctions being extended) or
  2. It really makes no real difference what day your auction ends on.

At present, I’m inclined to go with b)

I figured there might be a pattern with listing start days; wrong again!

Website Sale Listings by Day Listed

The only interesting fact to take away is that the fewest sites are listed on Saturday and Sunday, which being the weekend should theoretically be the most popular as people have the most time to spare. It seems however people are avoiding these days with 3 and 5 day listings to avoid their auction ending mid week.

The moral of this tale? Sometimes, statistics tell you nothing useful at all, but serve their purpose in creating a colourful graph :)

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  • Siddharma

    I find now that day is not relevant.

    All Flippa sales are ending badly lately with low views and no sales where many months ago this would happen with identical sites.

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Hi Siddharma,

      I’m sorry to hear you’re having a bad time but you’re not alone!

      What types of sites do you sell

      Justin

      • Siddharma

        many sites with gaming focus like xbox and playstation

  • http://www.removeremovals.co.uk/ Remove Removals

    Hi

    It was nice meeting you in Cheshire. Thanks for all the information.

    We’ve not got round to listing our first site yet but at least we know now that any day is fine :)

    All the best!

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Hi,

      It was good to meet you too! Hope you enjoy the blog.

  • http://apartments.com.ua George@Kiev apartments

    Hi, it is rather interesting blog. Well, I think there is no matter that your survey turn to be useless. The matter is that you have intention to carry out surveys and then perform them in such interesting way by creatin tables and charts. Great, I think.

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Hi George,

      Thanks for the encouragement.

      I don’t want to be a politician and use statistics for everything, but sometimes they can be useful!

      Justin

  • http://www.adulthives.com Stephen

    The way I look at it is the less sites listed, the less competition for the front page and that seeems to be the way general sites sell right now.

    I always find the most questions appear on the weekend when most people have the time to look at listings. If you want to buy a site, buying in the week gives you an advantage as there are less people to bid.

    Just my opinion :)
    Stephen

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Hi Stephen,

      I never looked at it from a buying perspective but I guess it makes sense. I remember picking up bargains on ebay at 7am in the morning
      simply because there were fewer people bidding!

      Thanks for stopping by

      Justin

  • http://nythemes.com nythemes

    good question,
    eBay sellers said that Sunday is the best day for them to end an auction since they got the most participants on that day, (not sure if this still holds true)

    One would think that the same principal would hold true for selling sites on flippa, but i guess judging from your numbers, this is not the case.

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Hey,

      I don’t really understand why, but I think the lack of correlation has something to do with the 4 hour extension which eBay doesnt have.

      You have some good looking themes on your site btw. Have you found many more people going for the ecommerce wordpress template lately? I this could be big, as people selling starter sites (niche blogs) are beginning to look for new opportunities?

      Justin

      • http://nythemes.com nythemes

        i can see how people selling starter sites would find the e-Commerce Themes useful. They could be used to build many types of ecommerce businesses. Dropship, Affiliate, digital products. Even flippers could use these to sell their own sites, templates, eBooks etc…

        The great thing about these WordPress e-commerce themes is they are simple to setup, you don’t need any other plugins, they work out-of-the box. Affiliate module is also build-in, so there is no need to join third-party providers like e-junkie to launch your own affiliate program.
        .-= nythemes´s last blog ..1595+ WordPress Jobs for Freelancers =-.

  • http://www.flippachick.com Yolanda @ Flippa Chick

    I love it! :) …you know, I’ve always avoided ending my auctions on weekends like the plague. The way I see it, the last thing an Internet Marketer wants to do on their day off is still search the web. Instead, I shoot for Tuesday’s and Fridays. However, I do list websites on the weekend (typically Saturday’s) in the hopes that they’ll sell by Tuesday/Wednesday.

    You know, I’d love to see statistics on how timing affects a sale. For instance, I once listed an auction around 2:00 am, and when it came time for it to end, I noticed bidders dropping off a little after 9:00 pm. :) Since then, I try to list auctions either at 11:00 am PST or no later than 6:30 pm PST. I figure that if I get bids sometime during the morning that may extended the auction, it won’t extend it too far to where bidders are up late trying to watch how the auction unfolds.

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Day off….do we still get those ? :)

      Hi Yolanda,

      Thanks for stopping by – you’ve got some great content on your blog.

      I tried looking at end times and the spikes we’re pretty inconsistent – I guess it’s due to some auctions being extended.

      One thing I guess we’ve got to take into account are the three main countries who visit and their timezone (US, India and UK). I know that in the UK we often end up getting outbid because US 9pm is approx 3am in the morning here.

      Justin

  • Andy

    Hi Justin,

    What about a correlation between the day auctions end and price? Could people be willing to pay more on Friday than Tuesday? Just wondering?

    Andy

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Hi Andy,

      At a guess I’d say it should even out, but I’ll run the numbers just after the weekend and post a link to a graph.

      Justin

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Hi Andy,

      Finally got that graph – it seems this is where things get a little more interesting!

      http://flipfilter.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/spa-by-end-day.jpg

      It’s fascinating that the weekends seem to have the lowest average sale prices – which is backed up when you look at all the higher priced auctions in the stats module. The top sellers always seem to end on a weekday.

      Thanks for the direction – I’m going to try to work out why this is the way it is!

  • http://www.flipwebsites.com Travis@FlipWebsites

    Justin:

    Great post. I don’t have access to the all the data like you do so I’ve been eyeballing this stuff by tracking the tagging activity at Flippa. My research concluded the same thing but it didn’t make sense so I was reluctant to blog about it. I found that the listing activity was pretty much the same for every day – except weekends were slightly slower. I had a hard time believing my own “research” because I thought for sure I would find one or two days that would stand out but that wasn’t the case at all. Thanks for confirming my own ad-hoc research…lol.

    I agree with you that it probably doesn’t matter when you launch your auctions. However, I also agree with Yolanda that the actual time of day probably does make a difference to some extent.

    Travis

    • http://flipfilter.com justin

      Thanks Travis.

      I think the only part that had strong correlation was Andy’s suggestion about sale price average to end day (http://flipfilter.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/spa-by-end-day.jpg).

      The lower averages on the weekends were mostly due to buy it nows on < $100 sites, happening on Sat and Sun, and higher price auctions ending in the week.

      J

  • http://www.pagerank.yoururllive.info pr-display

    One important thing to take into account more than ending day is ‘ending hour’.
    If your target market is western USA and you live in the eastern USA and you want the listing to end at selling prime time , say 7:00 to 10:00 pm, then dont forget to take the time zone into consideration.

  • Jacob

    The list ending parts actually works out well for me because I am usually free on Friday nights and Saturdays and end my listings on those days to make sure that I can talk with people just before the listing ends and then, if the winner pays right away, make the transfer on the same day.