If you are selling something unique that you only have one of, it can be very difficult to determine the starting price, because that may well be what you end up having to sell the item for. Depending on the item and its value, that could be a major gamble. With a high starting price, you probably won't get many bids and may get none at all. But with a low price, you could give up a valuable item for practically nothing.

eBay allows you to set a "reserve" price in addition to the starting price. This is the minimum price at which you would be willing to actually sell the item, but the bidders do not know what that number is. The theory is that a low starting price will interest bidders, but, with the reserve, you protect yourself from letting the item go for too little.

In practice, however, bidders hate auctions with reserve prices. It is very frustrating to come back again and again over the duration of an auction (typically 3-7 days), to finally enter the winning bid, and then to discover that there was a reserve which is higher than your final bid, which means you don't win at all. Hence most bidders will not participate in auctions that have reserves.

You might consider testing the market, by running an auction with a reserve to see how high the bids go. If they go over your reserve fine. In any case, you'll get an indication of the level of interest in your item. And if you relist without a reserve and maybe with a low bidding price -- which you can and should highlight in your description -- the bidding will probably go higher than it did with the reserve. But it's still a gamble.

It's a lot easier to deal with prices when you have many similar items or many that at least fall into the same general category, and when you wouldn't mind selling a few for $2 or $3, if the average sale were up around $20 or $30. Then you can fine-tune your pricing over time, based on experience.

For my auctions, I put the starting price as low as I can -- just a little more than break-even given all the time involved in posting the description, communicating with the winner, then preparing, packaging, and shipping the goods. A low start attracts a first bidder and activity breeds more activity. Remember, for many people, online auctions are entertainment. They get caught up in the excitement of competition. Hence you want to do whatever you can to attract a second bidder and a third -- to make it a contest. And a low starting price is an excellent way to get that rolling. For instance, a comic I sold for $34.00 was posted with a starting bid of $2. Other similar comics that I posted with a start of $10 or even $6 got no bids at all. In other words, if you have enough items in the same category to build a niche for yourself, low starting prices are likely to bring you higher average final sales costs.

The vast number of participants at eBay makes this possible. It's a bit like brownian motion -- if you get enough of these bidders banging around and you have enough similar items for sale, the bidding on any individual item will be random, but over time the results for a large number of items will be very consistent and predictable and you can, with confidence, sell valuable items with very low starting prices.

There is one important exception here -- beware of seasonal variations. For many collectibles, activity at eBay drops precipitously over the summer. Keep a close eye out for the seasonal buying patterns associated with the kind of thing that you have to sell.