Gearing Up For The Holidays

Unless you live under a rock, you're aware that Black Friday and Cyber-Monday are approaching fast. The theory is retailers are poised to get out of the red while consumers are forming lines after sitting down for turkey to get the sweetest deals.

Online, Cyber-Monday (12/1) is supposed to be a reaction by consumers who will have searched high and low for deals from Friday through Sunday without finding what they're looking for, sleep off their frustration and wake up Monday morning to surf the internet and find better deals than their local brick-and-mortars.

Can you guess I'm not buying this either?

The whole Black-Friday/Cyber-Monday/holiday shopping thing has already started on ebay. Over the last two years I've had more sales on Thanksgiving than the day after or on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

In preparation for this time, here are a few questions to see if you're ready for this time period:

• Do your Buy-It-Now listings have best offers?
• Have you set parameters for your best offers?
• Are your margins enough for the prices you're asking (if you're using BINs)?
• Are you offering anything other than a lower price to buyers?
• Are you selling Obama?
• If you have more than one of a card in a BIN listing, does this match your inventory?
• Are you buying etopps Baseball?
• If you are using auction-format listings, are they ending on the right day and the right time of day?