The £93 Aeroscreen That Nobody Can Buy

There’s a curious bit of psychology going on with an aeroscreen I’ve been watching on eBay.

A new one is generally about £141 on a Buy It Now basis, which is the normal asking price and something anybody seriously looking for one will establish fairly quickly. Then up pops an auction starting at £93.

Now, as an ex sales executive selling high-value equipment, I’m hardly unfamiliar with anchoring. I spent years around pricing, negotiation and buyer psychology, so I know perfectly well what that first number does. What amused me was that, despite knowing all that, it still worked on me.

The moment I saw £93, I stopped thinking of the aeroscreen as a £130 or £140 item and started thinking that perhaps I could nick it for under £100. So I put in a snipe at £95.50.

The 50p is my own little bit of bidding psychology. Plenty of people bid nice round numbers, so I tend to add something odd on the end in the hope that one day somebody else has bid £95 and my £95.50 wins it. Whether that is clever or merely another example of auction psychology is open to debate, but I’ve done it for years.

Anyway, the auction ended and I didn’t get it. Nobody did. The reserve hadn’t been met.

That was the point at which it struck me that the seller had probably made a fairly fundamental mistake. I don’t know what his reserve is, but I’d guess somewhere around £125 to £130, which is perfectly plausible if comparable new aeroscreens are sitting there at £141.

The problem is that he hasn’t anchored the buyer at £125 or £130. He’s anchored them at £93.

Once £93 is in your head, £95 feels sensible, £100 still feels like a bargain and £110 starts to feel as though the bargain is disappearing. By the time the bidding gets anywhere near £125, you’re no longer thinking that you’re still saving money against the £141 Buy It Now price. You’re thinking that the whole reason you became interested in the auction has vanished and you might as well just buy one elsewhere.

That is what I find interesting, because I knew all of this before I bid. I knew the market price, I knew what anchoring was and I knew exactly what that £93 opening figure was doing, yet I still approached the auction as a chance to buy a £141 item for £95.50 rather than as a chance to buy a £141 item for perhaps £125.

The seller, I suspect, thinks he is creating excitement. Start low, attract attention, get a few people bidding and let competition do the rest. That can work perfectly well if there are enough bidders and enough competitive heat, but this is an aeroscreen. It isn’t an iPhone. It’s a niche item with a relatively small pool of buyers, and most of them will probably know roughly what a new one costs.

So instead of attracting people prepared to pay £125 or £130, he risks attracting people like me who are interested precisely because they think they might get lucky at £95.50.

The reserve then makes the problem worse, because it reveals that the attractive opening price was never really available in the first place. The listing says £93, while the seller has a quite different figure in his head. Those 2 numbers are doing completely different jobs.

I suspect he’ll relist it, and if he relists it on exactly the same terms I wouldn’t be surprised if much the same thing happens again. Somebody bids £95, somebody else perhaps goes to £99 or £103, the reserve isn’t met and the auction ends without a sale.

If I genuinely wanted £125 for it, I’d be inclined to start somewhere near £125 and forget the reserve. Then £125 becomes the reference point and the buyer approaches the auction thinking that this is roughly what the thing costs. Alternatively, I’d simply put it up at £130 Buy It Now and let somebody decide whether they wanted it.

What I wouldn’t do is advertise £93 and then quietly refuse to sell it for anything like £93, because the seller thinks he is selling an aeroscreen when what he is actually selling first is an expectation. At £93, the expectation is that somebody might get lucky. At £130, the expectation is simply that this is what the thing costs.

Once you’ve put the wrong expectation into the buyer’s head, it can be surprisingly difficult to get it out again.

And that, I suspect, is why the aeroscreen may keep coming back. And why I bought another at £141.