Auction Lingo is a list of the abbreviations, jargon, and terminology, used when buying and selling online, using sites that describe themselves as auction venues.  That is, they do not themselves act in the capacity of an auctioneer, but provide auction-like facilities where buyers and sellers transact directly with each other.

This page is a “work in progress”, your comments and suggestions for additions are welcomed.

The “active topic” symbol links to a relevant discussion board in our forums.

•  2CO = 2nd Chance Offer not to be confused with the online payments company 2CheckOut, who also use the abbreviation 2CO as a corporate identifier.  A Second Chance Offer is given when a seller has multiple stock of an item sold in an online auction, and there are non-winning bidders.  The seller offers identical product(s) to the non-winning bidders, but at the highest price they bid, not at the opening or start price.  In recent years, the 2nd Chance Offer system has been a tool much abused by scam artists, most especially on eBay sites and in high value, fast moving, product categories such as personal electronics.  To some degree, eBay user education has made would-be buyers overly paranoid, as exercising even the minimum of common sense will protect 2CO receivers, and the degree of scamming activity is a tiny fraction of 1% of all trading activity in online auction sites.
• ASP - Average Selling Price - can be applied to the average selling price of a specific item type, or group of items, to a seller’s total inventory, or to a category of inventory.  It is a very flexible term and used a lot as an indicator of general price movements, or in relation to another financial such as the effect of fee changes.
• Auction  - A form of advert listing where the goods are offered for sale for a fixed period of time, during which, potential buyers may place priced bids to buy, in competition with each other. The bidder placing the highest bid “wins” and is deemed to have entered an irrevocable contract to purchase the item.
• Auction (Dutch) - An auction where more than one identical item or bundle of items, is offered for sale. At the end of the fixed time period, if there are more items than bidders, each bidder will win an item at the bid price of the lowest bidder. If there are more bidders than items, the highest-price bidders (counting back from the highest price to the lower price, and equal to the number of items offered) each win the items at the bid-price of the lowest successful bidder.
• Auction (Reverse)  - A strange new phenomenon gaining in popularity on the Internet. Each bidder pays the advertising site a fee for each bid they place, and the price of the item for sale reduces with each bid received. The bidder placing the lowest bid at the end of the auction period is the winner of that item at that lowest price. The host site then shares the bidding fees with the item seller (less commission from the achieved price) and the buyer pays the seller the achieved price plus shipping charges. This style of sale can be useful for disposing of excess inventory quickly, and for buying stock for resale.
• B2B = Business to Business. This is where both the buyer and the seller are businesses. These transactions involve different laws and regulations compared to either a P2P or a B2C transaction. The old adage of “Caveat Emptor” should be most stringently applied to B2B transactions, as often the only comeback a buyer may have on a seller is if the goods were paid for by a major credit card with purchase protection coverage.
• B2C = Business to Consumer. This is where the buyer is an individual private purchaser, and the seller is a business. Generally, in these transactions, all the legislative and other protections are on the side of the buyer. The seller has few legal recourses other than in the case of a dishonoured or dishonest (fraudulent) payment, and even then may suffer due to the chargeback & merchant protection rules of the payment processing company.
• BIN / Buy Now / Buy It Now - There are several variations of this name depending on which site you are visiting. It is essentially a method of making a Fixed Price purchase, immediately, from a site regarded as an Auction site, as though you were buying from a regular retailing website.
• GMV = Gross Merchandise Value.  This is primarily eBay jargon, though it is creeping onto other sites.  It refers to a person’s, category’s, product’s, or site’s, total achieved sold items value before any costs.  For example, if 10 televisions sold at £80.00 each within a specific week, the for that week the GMV for TVs would be £800.00 - this does not indicate the profits made (gross or net) as some of those TVs may have sold in auction style listings at lower than their cost price.  GMV is only useful as a measure of total money spent by buyers in a given period or category, or for a particular product type in a given period.  It has no serious accounting worth as it cannot be used to accurately calculate the fee income to the auction venue.
• P2P = Person to Person. Whether a small business or an individual clearing an attic, P2P means that one person is selling to another person directly. The venue site or service does not intermediate in processing the transaction, though they may provide tools to ease completion of it, but it is still up to the buyer and seller to interact with each other at every stage, without 3rd party assistance.
• SIF / Shop / Store Inventory Format - Again, there are various names for this depending on which site you are viewing. They all have in common that the items in question are not listed in Auction or regular-BIN format, instead they are listed in a special site section dedicated to a particular seller, and usually referred to as the seller’s shop / store / storefront / mall etc. SIF items are sold under BIN conditions in that the buyer purchases at a fixed price displayed in the item description, and usually has the choice of a single item, or buying more than one identical item from the same listing. SIF is commonly used for commodity items and for very slow moving stock, because the costs of using this format is usually cheaper than Auction or BIN, and it prevents slow-moving items from clogging browse and search lists in the main site categories. It is therefore useful for both sellers and site administrators.
• Feedback - Today’s popularly adopted feedback concept, is based on a system created by eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, in the pre-eBay, AuctionWeb version of the site in the mid 1990’s. The original concept was simple, based on a buyer and seller’s overall opinion of each other, they could leave each other a Positive, Negative, or Neutral rating as a reward or punishment for how he transaction had proceeded. This same concept is now applied throughout the online auction and online sales venue world (including on Amazon). eBay have decided to change it (Jan 2008) with a major revision that is costing them a large percentage of their paying customers ….. lesson = don’t fix what isn’t broken. The feedback concept also appears in many online discussion boards, where it is usually referred to as Karma points and restricted to plus or minus points (the idea being that neutral karma does not need public notification).
• Gallery = Generally, Gallery refers to the small thumbnail image appearing next to an item title in a browse or search list of items on an online auction site, or classifieds site.  However, somesites use it to refer to something else altoghether, and refer to that thumbnail as, ….. well, a thumbnail
• Multi-item PP&H discount - Not every seller offers this, though most pro-sellers make a selling point of doing so. Buyers should read item descriptions and terms of sale carefully to see if it applies to what they are interested in. The concept revolves around the idea that if several items are sent in one package, there is only one set of packaging and handling costs, perhaps only one registered delivery charge, and perhaps a lower postal rate per Kg as the package gets heavier. For sellers of widely different items, it can be a major burden to accurately calculate multiple item postage rates and input appropriate discounts into postage calculators on lots of different selling venues. Despite this, many sellers do so to the best ability allowed by the site interface, yet it is still often not good enough for some unreasonable buyers. eBay is notorious for inconsiderate buyers complaining that sellers “overcharged” postage by a few percent, and leaving the seller adverse feedback as a result. This problem does not seem to occur so heavily on other sites, and perhaps the blame lies with eBay’s buyer-centric management philosophy that brainwashes buyers into thinking all sellers are overcharging for P&P, when the reality lies in the inadequacy of the 10-year old eBay shipping interface?
• Offsite / Onsite transactions & links - In the context of using third-party online advertising and sales venues, offsite means outside of their buying and selling system, onsite means within it. Some sites regard offsite linking or transactions as the most cardinal of sins (because it deprives them of fees for the transactions) and will ban or otherwise punish users attempting such actions. Other sites couldn’t care less and actively encourage members to use their site merely as a meeting place for buyers and sellers, regarding offsite transactions as being less strain on their infrastructure and a unique selling point of their site. It pays to read each site’s terms and conditions, user agreements, and discussion boards, in order to learn the site specific culture regarding this topic.
• Snipe / Sniping = the action of placing a bid in an online auction, as close as possible to the end of the fixed period for bidding, in such a way that the bid received becomes the winning bid and leaves too little time for other bidders to place countering bids to win the item.  Opinion on sniping is divided in the online auction world - in both buyer and seller groups are people who welcome snipe bidding, and people who would like to see an end to its use.  Some say it deters new bidders who don’t understand why they didn’t win after having the top bid for days, others say it allows people to win items at the start price, without having to display bids that could attract competitive bidding.  Not all sites permit software managed sniping; eBay (due to its size and computer API software interfaces) is the site that sees its use the most.
• Webstore  = either a shop / store type facility within one of the above auction style sites, or a retailing catalogue hosted within a virtual shopping mall, or a sellers own website which is ecommerce-enabled, so that all or part of it acts as an online order point where payment can also be made.  In alternative virtual worlds such as Second Life, some game players are setting up genuinely virtual webstores where other gamers’ avatars can walk in and buy virtual goods only available within the store.  Others are using a hybrid virtuality, whereby the other players buy virtual goods in the store, at a price that also enables them to receive the real world articles via normal channels, but making only the one payment in the virtual store.  There are several examples of players heading to become real world millionaires from this type of selling.  (Ed - Oh I wish …… what a way to become a real millionaire - playing computer games  )

The above list is neither definitive, nor final, and as time goes by, it will no doubt grow - your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Ed