Buy It Now is the option that lets you sell your item to the first bidder who offers a specific fixed price. If the first bidder bids lower than the Buy It Now price, the Buy It Now option disappears and the auction continues as normal. To add the BIN option to an auction, you’ll pay anywhere from a nickel to a quarter extra, depending on the amount of the Buy It Now price.
Should you use Buy It Now? The downside is that Buy It Now adds to an auction’s confusion factor, possibly scaring away some users. (The presence of a high Buy It Now relative to the starting price, in any caseis apt to tell some buyers that you’re asking more for your item than it’s worth, or that similar items are selling for.) The upside is that if you set a high enough Buy It Now price and some chump ponies up, you get your money sooner than if you’d allowed the auction to continue to its natural conclusion.
If you’re going to use Buy It Now, make sure that it’s worth your while. You definitely don’t want to set a Buy It Now price lower than what you think your item will eventually sell for. For example, if you know that similar items have been selling for $20 on eBay, the absolute lowest you want to set your Buy It Now price is $20. If you set the Buy It Now price at $15, for example, some sharp buyer is going to swoop in and pay you $15 for an item that probably would have sold for $20.
In fact, if you use the Buy It Now option, you probably want to set the Buy It Now price at some point higher than the expected high bid price. Taking our $20 example, you might set the Buy It Now at $25. If somebody wants to buy it now, they’ll pay you a $5 premium for the privilege. If not, bidding will proceed as normal until a (presumably lower) high bid is realized.