Would like to know your thought process on the length of your auctions. It seems extremely long to me and at times do to this I lose interest or forget about the auction itself. I know you are trying to get the most bids and price. It would seem better to it them down to around 2 weeks to keep all on their toes and to keep intersest. A lot goes on in the auction business in a months time and it gives us an oppurtunity to buy local in that time period and fill our stores without using your service so much.
Hey Goldminer,
I actually completely, 100%, agree with this idea. It’s something we have been working on with our vendors. We generally try to encourage them to hold shorter auctions. Some of them have started to come around on the issue and we have been holding some auctions for as short as 2-3 days. I think in the long run more of them will come around on the issue, and we will be able to host most auctions for much shorter than we currently do.
Thanks for the feedback,
Adrian
Adrian, Thanks for your reply. I have to thank you for actually getting back to me. as much as I do not like the online auctions as there are questions to be asked about the storage owners themselves which I have experienced I hope you can get control and make this a much more user friendly auction for us that make some of our living doing this. Since the advent of Storage Wars all hell has happened even in the small town I am in. I believe in free enterprise but fairness in this business has gone away. It would be nice to bid on these units and know that they are not being bid up and there is fairness so that all can make some money.
Hey goldminer,
I totally get where you are coming from, when storage wars came out we were actually already running online auctions. I couldn’t believe the explosion of new users and INSANE prices the auctions were going for. On the brighter side of things, i have noticed with some of my analytics that the Storage Wars hype has started to burn out a bit over the last couple months. I think a lot of the newbies that were bidding auctions up like crazy got in, got burned, and got out. Which is good news for the bidders who are doing this for a living.
To be perfectly honest, at bid13 we prefer bidders like you. People who know what they’re doing and know how to not get burned. We have had WAY more problems with the Storage Wars fans than any other users on our site. A lot of those types of bidders really don’t know what they’re getting into and end up often biting off way more than they can chew. So I am personally looking forward to things returning back to a more normal state.
With everything on the internet being so public these days, we built our original website with bidder privacy in mind. The original idea was that if we didn’t expose the bidder history it would keep the bidder’s safer from ex tenants trying to track them down.
Of course the obvious downside of this became apparent to us, and we realized we needed to come up with a better solution. On our new website we are building a feature that reveals the bidding history to anyone who has placed a bid. This way ensuring that the general public can still not see the bidder history, but actual bidders can see who is bidding them up.
Thanks for the ideas! we really appreciate the feedback, it helps us make our website better for you guys!