We all make buying decisions in different ways, but as far as we can say, most people do it in the sequence - WHAT to buy and then WHERE to buy. I have gone through this decision process often in the past before. I hope some of my some of my thoughts about this process will be of assistance to you in deciding on how to handle your auto auction and which auto auction service to use

There is a lot more to auto auction than just autos. Auto auctions usually includes Services, Accessories, Tools&Equipment, Car Audio and Vehicles themselves. They often classify cars by different categories too, including classification by vendors and models. All four auto auction we have used so far have a complicated subcategory structure, sometimes interlinked with other categories. On average the number of inner categories and subcategories for all the auto auction is about 3-4. That can make finding a specific item needed a challenging task (and it did often!). Categories themselves can vary in names as well on different auto auction - just look at this: Cars, Trucks & Parts (eBay), Cars & Transportation (Amazon.com), Automotive (Yahoo auctions), Cars (MSN). The following table might give you some idea about the number of subcategories in the main category :

 

 

To compare different auto auction I counted the number of goods for every auto auction. The count was performed for categories as they are presented on each respective site. Of course there are slight differences in details, but we can still estimate the relative number of items for sale, as the categories in all auto auction are fairly similar. The results are in this diagram:

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This gives you an idea of what the most popular car salavge auctions are but there is more to it. You can get a more accurate picture of auto auction popularity by looking at the average number of bids per goods group. Most goods listed have no bids posted so I decided to estimate the average number of goods with no bids made. I chose two considerably popular car brands (Mercedes and BMW), sorted results by auto auction end time (from earliest to latest) and looked at the bids. The query returned too few results for MSN (something like 5 for total number of goods) the results for the MSN auto auction aren't very reliable. So on the following graph the fewer the number of "zero bid" goods , the more popularity these auto auction have among buyers.

 

Number of 'zero-bids' goods (percentage):

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So as before, that indisputable leader in number of items listed is eBay. So if you do not want to bother checking all the various categories for all of the auto auction sites in a quest for particular item - you can be pretty sure by starting at eBay and finding what you need there.

The next thing that I thought might be of interest is auto auction geography. I should note here that all of the above was based purely on US auto auction which has the biggest volume. In the table I look at the international geography covered by each of the major auto auction sites. As a rule, they are listed in their native language, but have all the same functionality as the US sites.

Auto Auction geography.

In the number of international auto auction Yahoo has a hair lead over eBay. But, as you can see, in all the other nominations the winner is eBay Motors by far.

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