A consignor asks whether to auction an item rather than list it at a fixed price. It is a reasonable question. An auction has a deadline, and a deadline creates urgency that a Buy It Now listing does not.
The usual answer is that auctions suit items whose value is uncertain, because competing bidders discover the price for you.
That answer assumes competing bidders exist. We wanted to know whether they do.
What we counted
On 12 September 2026 we sampled 4,989 distinct live auction listings in eBay Australia’s Men’s Athletic Shoes category, and recorded the bid count and closing time of each.
4,455 of them — 89% — carried no bid at all.
The obvious objection: bids arrive at the end
Auction bidding is widely understood to concentrate in the closing minutes. If that is what is happening, a mid-run auction showing no bids has not failed; it simply has not finished.
So we grouped the same listings by how long they had left.
| Time to close | Listings | No bids | Median bids where any | Median price where any |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 hour | 112 | 93% | 2 | $32 |
| 1–6 hours | 935 | 92% | 1 | $40 |
| 6–24 hours | 900 | 88% | 2 | $56 |
| 1–3 days | 764 | 84% | 1 | $45 |
| 3 days or more | 2,278 | 89% | 1 | $27 |
The rate does not fall as listings approach closing. It is marginally higher in the final hour than three days out.
That is the opposite of what late bidding would produce. Bids accumulate over an auction’s life, so listings near their close have had longer to attract one. If bidding were happening during the run, the final-hour group would show the fewest empty listings. It shows the most.
One bid is not price discovery
Among listings that had attracted any bid, the median was one.
A single bid means the item sells at its opening price. Two bids means one increment above it. Neither is a market deciding what something is worth.
The prices tell the same story. Where bids existed at all, the median was between $27 and $56. Whatever bidding activity this category has sits almost entirely in cheap stock.
What this means for a listing decision
On this evidence, in this category, an auction is a fixed-price listing with a deadline and no floor.
That reframes the decision. The question is not “what should I open at to attract bidders” but “am I willing to sell at my opening price”, because on these numbers that is the likely outcome. An opening price set low to invite competition is simply a low price.
It also narrows where an auction earns its place: stock you are content to clear at your opening number, where a deadline is worth more to you than the ceiling. That is a real use — it is just a much smaller one than “let the market decide”.
Limits of this measurement
These are live listings, not completed ones. We did not observe how any of them ended. We infer that a listing with no bids an hour from closing will close without one, which is an inference, not an observation.
It is one snapshot, taken at a single moment on one day. It is one category on one marketplace, and sneakers are not representative of everything a store sells.
Auction durations vary between one and ten days, so time-to-close is not a clean measure of how long a listing has been running. A one-day auction an hour from closing has been live for 23 hours; a ten-day auction three days out has been live for a week. The groups in that table are not matched cohorts.
Bid count is also an imperfect measure of demand. A listing with a reserve can carry bids and still not sell, and we did not separate those.
What the data supports is narrow and, we think, still useful: most auctions in this category are not attracting bidders, and that is not explained by late bidding.
Why we looked
We were asked whether to auction a pair of designer sneakers rather than list them at a fixed price. The answer mattered because the downside was large and asymmetric.
Adding an auction option to a listing tool is straightforward. Knowing whether to use it is the harder part, and it is the part a seller actually needs. We would rather answer that question with a count than an opinion.