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tramahound · May 19, 2003, 09:52 PM

Ebay auction
I'm trying to raise money to buy my wife a nice birthday present and figure selling my copy of Final Cut Pro would enable me to do so. The auction isn't going so well though, so please visit it or tell someone you know about it. This is for a full RETAIL package of Final Cut Pro 3 (not educational) and includes a bonus dvcreators tutorial cd which costs $80 normally. I had installed FCP on my tibook 400, but didn't have time to learn how to use it well enough and would probably be better off using iMovie to compile our family videos for the time being. I have already removed FCP from my hard drive and according to Apple all that needs to be done to have the product registered in your name is to do just that, register it in your name. once that is done I'm bumped off the registration. Everything is in mint condition and barely used. All books are included, the stickers for you to place on your keyboard to learn the shortcuts are included and never used. Short of the shrink-wrap being removed this package is brand new. Please help me out with this auction! Thanks

digi-j · May 20, 2003, 06:39 AM

general rule of thumb for eBay: start your price at $1 with no reserve. this will get several people bidding right away and they will be more likely to fight it out at the end. When you start it at $300 and it still says 'reserve not met', you are driving people away AND you are paying a higher fee to start the auction. People will look at it and say "hmm, the dude probably wants too much money and Final Cut Pro 4 is out soon anyways..." The upgrade to 4.0 is $400 already, so you might have to rethink your strategy

wallinbl · May 20, 2003, 07:01 AM

The real benefit to starting at $1 is that you will get a number of bids before you get to $300. Then, in the last day of your auction, it will have more legitimacy in the minds of bidders because there are already 15 bids on it. If a bidder sees 2 auctions for the same product at the same price, they will prefer the one that has 15 bids over the one that has 1 bid. It's goofy, but it happens.

tramahound · May 20, 2003, 07:06 AM

I can understand that, but at the same time I really don't want to risk having it go for $20 after spending $1000 on it! I understand things loose their value and especially so in this case with FCP4 coming and all, but at the same time I feel my $350 asking price is pretty understandable for what is basically a brand new product. We'll see, I might need to re-list it anyway since it seems like nobody is interested. I'd really rather not sell it for less than $300-350 though. Thanks for the suggestions though.

digi-j · May 21, 2003, 02:52 AM

Yeah, I know it's scary to start an auction for $1 when it's an expensive product, but selling on eBay is a quirky thing. Keep in mind auctions tend to rocket up in the last 5 minutes too. As bidders get smarter, they learn to "watch" auctions rather than bid on them and drive the price up. Then with a few seconds left they finally bid and "snipe" the auction.