The obvious way to get attention with your opening bid is to make it outrageously low. Perhaps $0.01. (This assumes that you aren't trying to insure yourself against a low bid by adding a $20 handling charge to, say, a small item that costs only $2 to mail.) There's nothing like a leading zero to make the scanner pause. However, a lot of people use this trick, perhaps so many that it's not as effective as it once was. The same is true of $0.99, which to the seller is the same as one dollar, while supposedly fooling the buyer into thinking it's much less.
But you can still play around with prices for effect. Try jarring buyers' eyes with some unexpected numbers in an opening bid, like $0.43 or $0.37. Since a low opening bid is in effect a token bid, $0.43 or $0.37 is the same as $0.01 from the seller's perspective. But either of these is new, or at least different, to buyers - different enough to make them notice.
Odd numbers in higher opening bids can get attention, too: $7.38 rather than $7.50, for example. Because of the retail pricing structures we all grew up with, most of us have a tendency to use -49, -50, -95, -97, -98, or -99 when we set a dollar fraction in a bid, so any number other than those is likely to stand out.
Full article: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y20 ... bu0191/s02
