36 Bucks? Are You Serious?

Here's some suggestions:

1) I think your ending time on this auction really hurt you. 11pm Eastern on a Saturday night is not a good time. I think 7-10pm Eastern on a Sunday night will give better results. People are busier on Saturday night
2) I think your titles could be better. "Old" and "United States" add nothing to the mix. Even though technically correct, I would use "XF" and well as "EF" - anyone searching for XF didn't see your coin.
3) I think your description section is way to wordy. I'd remove the "A bit about me" section - it's too much to read. I'd format your description to catch the reader and be easy to read. For example:

Very nice 1858-O Seated Liberty half dollar in VF-35/EF-40 condition.

Nice crusty problem free coin!

Great addition to a type set or seated coin set!

I guarantee satisfaction, and if you are not absolutely satisfied with your purchase, you may return this item within 14 days for a full refund.

4) The one bad deal hurts some - some may see the 99.2% feedback and look away. I don't think trying to explain what happened helps - if someone gets past the initial look, they will see from your feedback that it was just one bad deal.

Unfortunately, ebay's a real crap shoot sometimes - you just never know really...

Ken

Shadow: You probably don't want to hear this, but it IS possible that there are snipers out there who are using some type of last minute sniping program and are simply entering ridiculously low bids. There might have been a couple bidders who tried to snipe it at $35.00 or $36.00 that you don't know about simply because their bid was too low to register.

I agree with Bobby that your title sucked and with KenKat that 11:00 PM eastern time is too late. Best to keep it between 9:00 and 10:00.

If you do 10:00, that's 7:00 Pacific. Given the average age of the coin collector, that's plenty of time for the AARP 4:30 early bird special at the local buffet!

I auctioned a few things off recently and had good luck with 7:30 Eastern. That's after dinner on the east coast and before dinner on the west.

I think if you go much later than 10:00 eastern you start to lose those bidders.

I imagine though that there were not. If there were, seems that they would be probably more around $50 or $60......on $80 coins when I'd try to snipe at $45 or $50 I'd often see sniping to $60 or $65 at least. My price threshold is usually lower than theirs and for that reason I lose more often than not. My other coins had no snipers either, when almost all my lots before did.

Neither did any of the other coins ending tonight from other sellers, apparently. Almost every single coin ending that night got absolutely creamed. That seemed to be the issue more than anything, so while I'll take a lot of these suggestions, hopefully my next batch does better.

I think I'm probably going to eliminate the description in my last round. It seems that the more you write, the more they're suspicious of you, when the opposite is often true = ( Still, I hope I do more comparably to the last auction round before the one Saturday night. That wouldn't be too bad and I need the money. What is a normal number of watchers for a mid level type coin 1-2 days before auction end? I want to know if I'm getting enough of these also.

Sorry to hear about your losses, but good thing you made some money on your recent sales. I sold most of my collection due to some other situations and I kinda wanted to start over, and here's how it went. I sold about $350 on ebay since I sold most of the coins on other venues, and as for the ebay auctions I did pretty well. I have no idea what my reasoning was back then but I ended most of the auctions at around 4 PM on Saturday, and I seemed to do better compared to previous experiences by putting less in the description and using all caps titles. I made solid profits on most, except I lost almost half on a 1921 SLQ but I somewhat expected that since I cracked it out of the PCGS slab.

After factoring in all costs, I made a slight profit, so I was pretty happy. Here was my most profitable auction percentage wise, given that I paid $15 for the coin.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...t_572wt_1057

I'm not going to disclose exactly how much, but I made heavy profits a few times. It seems like its do-able, you just have to get the timing right because regardless of the number of watchers, most bidders bid last minute and if they're out, the coin will go absolutely nowhere unless its a highly sought after popular key. Adding a note about combining shipping is probably a nice idea.