This to me was the single most crucial detail to success or failure.  Remember, your item ends exactly at the same time you start it.  So you really have to think about what it is your selling and just who is going to be bidding on it.  What time frame do you think is most likely for those potential buyers to be on ebay searching for your item?  If you sell jewelry for example.  Think about the age group of the buyers. On the whole.  my buyers are mostly elderly women browsing through my items for interesting pieces of both vintage and new jewelry.  Most of my customers log off of ebay around 9:00 pm.  So I will not list jewelry past that time.  It took some experimenting and trial and error to get to that point though.  I had a stressfull period in my life in which I could not sleep at night. Unable to sleep, I decided I would save time by listing jewelry at 2 and 3 in the morning.  Unfortunately I discovered my auctions were ending with 1 or no bids. I also got emails from potential customers asking me if I was going to list the item again as they were not awake or forgot to bid before they went to bed.  Once I realized this, I started listing at a time that I thought was the best to end a jewelry auction.  I paid attention to other similar auctions and when they ended and compared the ending prices of those items to mine and the results were amazing.  Now I usually only list auctions on a Friday between 6 and 8:30.  They end at the same time, so I try to stagger auctions at 4 or 5 minute intervals as well, so it gives people time to bid on several items they are interested in.  Jewelry is like food.  You can always sell it in any economy and to everybody.  You just have to know how to do it and when. As long as people get married, there will always be wedding anniversaries, birthdays are year round too.  Christmas is excellent only to be surpassed by Valentine's Day.  You need to plan ahead and try to have a little for everybody in all economic levels.