Another weekend has disappeared in a puff of smoke. I failed miserably to list some things on eBay that I wanted to, although I did go online to buy myself a new raincoat after mine fell apart during a ‘light shower’ (it was practically ripped from my body by the violence of the rain).

This prompted me to wonder what days of the week are the best days to buy and sell. I suppose there is an element of chance involved in buying and selling online, given that I bought a new raincoat because mine expired that morning and it just happened to be a Sunday, but do some things sell better on certain days of the week?

It’s not always about best days to buy and sell though, is it? What about the best time to buy and sell? When you’re selling online, the trick is to figure out who your audience is for each specific problem. Students for example, tend to rise late and stay up late. Busy Mums will be the reverse. Workers will be bored during their lunch breaks, and most people will have time to get online at weekends. You should also factor in whether you’re selling abroad or not. If you’re selling in Europe then they’ll be a few hours ahead. In Asia they’ll be 5-7 hours ahead. In the USA they’ll be 6-8 hours behind and so on.

According to an eBay study, the number of visitors to the e-commerce website peaks between 8:00 PM eastern time and 10:00 PM pacific time – but that’s on eBay.com. EST is about 4-5 hours behind us depending on whether we’re BST or GMT and PT is 7-8 hours behind. But basically, we can infer that evenings are the best time to sell on eBay so auctions that finish during that window MAY attract more last minute bids and gain the largest possible audience. The optimum time to end an auction is apparently 9 pm, or in the three hours after that. BUt again, this depends what you’re selling and to whom.

The most visitors are logged on Sunday evening, so again, auctions that finish on a Sunday evening will tend to have more bids. If you’re one of the people who doesn’t actually like to be online on a Sunday evening, don’t forget you can set your auctions up in advance to end at a specific time, although there is a surcharge for this. So, research suggests Sunday is the best day to end an auction, followed by Saturday and then Friday.

Email marketing: best days of the week?

OK, so that’s the best days to buy and sell sorted. What about the best days for marketing your wares? The best days to buy and sell by email marketing? It’s all very well having an email marketing strategy but if they are never read, you’re dead in the water. I looked at some research with regard to sending marketing email and found out some fascinating facts although there don’t appear to be any hard and fast rules, and you should basically use your common sense.

Bear in mind that Monday and Friday are meeting days. If you’re selling B2B, note that people arriving at their desk on a Monday morning will have plenty of email to contend with and may only glance at yours before mentally filing it (never to return) or deleting it and moving onto something more important. On Fridays, people are gearing up for the weekend and are less likely to be thinking about doing more work. Let’s face it, on a Monday everyone is busy and web analytics have shown that volume of engagement with the web and email is lower.

If you’re selling direct to customers, then Monday may be a busy day for them, with plenty of chores to do after the weekend, getting kids off to school, so on and so forth.

With all this in mind, it seems that you may get the best response to a marketing email on a Tuesday, but remember that Tuesday is usually peak day for web traffic too, so there’s a lot going on. Tuesday is traditionally the most popular day of the week for visits to B2B websites.

Wednesday is a fairly good option for your email marketing as there is a relatively low volume.

Thursday sees email marketing creeping up again, as many people want to target people before they finish for the weekend and they’ve figured that Friday is a no-go.

Friday is a weird one. While fewer emails are sent on Friday and over the weekend as well, there is the potential there for you to have less competition when your email pings in to the inbox. It may get seen because people are generally working less flat out, but this is offset by lower opening rates for email. Of course the email may be opened at the weekend, and certainly the weekend is good for a weekly roundup email – newsy and fun.

Here’s some other things to bear in mind

23.8% of email are opened in the first hour. Less than 1% of email that remain unopened after 24 hours will ever be opened.

67% of people who subscribe to your website will open an email from you if you send it straight away
37% will then click through to your website.

Saturday has the lowest volume of email for the week, so you have the least competition.

Over to you

Do you find that certain things sell better on some day days of the week over others? What are the best days to buy and sell? Let us know in a comment below or come and chat to us on our Facebook page.