Good sold: A straw hat with simple decoration
Auction link: http://hk.f1.page.auctions.yahoo.com/hk/show/qanda?aID=1125792775
Selling price: $30
Transaction method: Face-to-face in Mongkok MTR Station
After the auction, we summarized our experience and suggested some possible improvements:
Product:
It is attractive because straws are attractive to teenage girls for matching different looks. Also, the ribbon on the hat is added by us. It is another attractive point for customers.
However, we found that there are the same type of straws which different color are now selling in the market of yahoo auction now. But We only provide the white color one, so may limit the customers’ choices. In addition, we may provide different color of ribbon for variety of choice.
Price:
At first we thought $30 is the reasonable place after balancing our cost and estimated profit. However it may be a bit high as we observed that the customers were not very interested in it. Even the person who bought the straw attempted to ask us on email if we can lower the price.
We reviewed the situation and an idea came up: If we could provide more straw, we could introduce discount for bulk purchase. Also, we might compare the price with our product and the price of our competitors’ products. Then we could adjust the price if necessary.
Place:
It is very convenient to reach our product on Yahoo! Auction. We put the photo of the straw on the auction page. The potential customers may get the information of the product. Besides, we put the information and photo in Facebook and forums, and asked our friend to share the link on their Facebook pages in order to reach more potential customers.
Moreover, we set the location of the trade, which is Mongkok MTR Station or Kowloon Tong MTR Station. We thought that they are highly accessible as Mongkok is a popular place for teenagers, and Kowloon Tong is the interchange station for two MTR lines. In fact, we could send out the product by mail. Yet, we set a certain additional price for mailing as we would encourage to trade face-to-face. Finally, the buyer chose to trade in Mongkok.
Promotion:
We posted our product in facebook and also uwants forum.
As mentioned above, we provided the link of the auction page in Facebook, forums and share to friends. Besides, we provided an extra photo for their reference. There is a girl wearing a similar straw in the photo. It can show how we can match the straw with the clothes. Also, we named the straw as “New fashion in Japan and Korea”. It would be a way of packaging the product to make it fashionable.
However, we realized that the auction page was not attractive in terms of its look. We could make more effort to decorate the page for catching the eyes of audiences. The look of the page would be in Japanese or Korean style to match our naming of the straw.
Other improvements:
As we are new in online selling, we opened an account for this auction. Unfortunately, the customers online mostly buy things from the experienced sellers, because of high creditability of them. During the process, there is few people approaching us. We think it is because of our low creditability.
Lastly, the duration of our auction is not long enough. If we announce the auction on internet earlier, more potential customer may able to reach us, as well as, we could have more time to observe the market and take appropriate actions in changing the marking mix strategy.
