Auction Business Frank Ross on 22 Oct 2006 08:02 am
Who is Watching?
We have an eBay store and we also run eBay auctions. Mostly we use auctions to entice people to look at our eBay store. For example, we have a thing in our auctions that says “If you don’t feel like waiting for the auction, there’s more of these in our store” (with a link to the store listing).
I’ve noticed in our seller panel, under the column “# of Watchers”, that on some store listings, we have watchers. There are always lots of watchers for auction listings, because people want to watch them to snipe or have their sniping software do the last minute bidding. But what possible purpose could there be for watching a seller’s store items?
I mean eBay store items are GTC (good til canceled) and they’re fixed price. I suspect that these ‘watchers’ are competitors or other sellers watching to see whether and how many of the items sell. In other words, these watchers are doing research.
On one hand, it would be nice to delete watchers like that, but on the other hand, I sometimes do that too! :-0