How to a Discover a Successful Best Offer Price on eBay

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One of the things that annoys me about eBay is the inconsistency across its client software: web, mobile web, Android, iOS. You can do some things in one but not another, sometimes getting the data you want, sometimes not.

More and more items are being sold via the "Best Offer" option on fixed-price listings. However, unless you are actively "watching" these items, they do not show up when you do a search for completed, sold listings when you are using a web browser. And if you can locate them with an item number search, you will see only that a best offer was accepted without knowing what that number is.

You can subscribe to Terapeak to find out the number, but I discovered a quick-and-dirty way to do the same.

For example, a very nice CIB Vectrex 3D Imager (with a CIB 3D Crazy Coaster!) sold on August 10. It started as a $999.99 BIN with the "Best Offer" option.

However, do a search for "vectrex imager" from your browser, then click the "Sold listings" check box. If you are in the US as I am, you should see four domestic listings (as of the writing of this post).

The listing described above is not one of the four. (You can find it by doing a search for the item number. It's 271255820450.)

However, if you use the eBay app for iOS, you get three listings, and the third is the listing in question. I think this is because the web presence digs back further in time for listings--but it also does not show listings that ended with an accepted best offer.

Using the iOS app, you will see the accepted best offer price in the green "price tag" icon at the corner of the image after you flip the "Sold items" switch and return to the listings. However, if you click on the image to see the listing description, the price will revert back to the BIN price, $999.99 in this case. Something tells me this is a bug in the app.

This trick works on the Android eBay app too.

Oh, and the accepted best offer was $800. Very nice pickup for whomever got it.