Most of my selling on Ebay has been in bike related stuff. But now that we are clearing out the house in prep for a move to Japan, I've started selling off a bunch of woodworking hand tools. And I immediately noticed a pretty big difference in buyer behavior for woodworking tools vs. vintage bike parts buyers.

That is, the tools guys seem to bid (and watch) early and often, whereas the vintage bike guys are stone killer snipers, holding their fire till the last minute.

I posted 10 auctions today for stuff, none of it is collector/unique, although it is high end, finely crafted stuff (think Lie Nielsen). Within about 6 hours, several items had been bid up close to final value - some of this stuff is available new, so there is a clear upper bound. And the majority of items had multiple nominal bids. Everything has plenty of watchers....

Me, I pretty much got used to selling bike stuff, where even highly desirable stuff sometimes goes for days before getting even the 99 cent bid. I also learned not to worry about this, since all the action was frequently the last two minutes.

So this is sort of interesting. I've got some theories about why it is different, maybe just a deeper market, some demographic factors.

Anyone else ever notice substantially different behaviors in different categories? Had it even occurred to me to ask the question in advance, I would have guessed that my tool auctions would have proceeded similarly to higher end bike parts auctions, since generically, they are similar goods - non-essential, connossieurial, nicely crafted stuff in a $50-$300 range for well informed enthusiasts, but it isn't looking that way in this example.