Posted By:
martin dalziel
As a seller you cannot rely on the watchers list to be the sole indicator of interest. I watch and track a lot of items on Ebay, but i don't use Ebay to track them - i use my own bookmarks in 'my favorites'. If a particular seller has a lot of items of interest to me, i track the sellers list and not the individual items - again via my bookmarks.
As a seller, the number of hits an item has is a better indicator of interest to me - i've got some records i'm selling on Ebay right now. One of them has 87 hits, with 6 people having adding it to their 'watch list'. Hits isn't alwys that good of an indicator either as many people come back multiple times a day to see if anything changed.
I guess the conclusion here is that if you're interested in an item and want the seller to know that, then you're best to add it to your watch list, visit the auction multiple times so the 'hits' counter is high, and bid early to indicate interest. Sellers fly pretty much blind, especially if they're selling items that they don't know much about.