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Experiences with eBay Best Offer


boxpressed

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Not too long ago, I shifted all my eBay listings from BIN only to BIN/Best Offer. What happened was kind of surprising. I didn't expect very many people to hit the BIN when a Best Offer option was available. Some items were rare, which would explain why the buyer would not use Best Offer (risking that the item would be sold while waiting for a response). But most items did not fall into this category. The surprising thing was that about half of my sales have been at the BIN price. These buyers didn't want to bother with making an offer even though they could have saved 10%, maybe more. It makes me wonder whether some buyers are nervous or intimidated when making an offer.

 

Anyway, I thought this would be a fun thread to discuss this finding or to share other entertaining stories about Best Offer.

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5 minutes ago, boxpressed said:

It makes me wonder whether some buyers are nervous or intimidated when making an offer.

Pretty much my reason for never making an offer. While I assume I'd never make an insane low ball offer- I feel like some people take asking for less as a slap in the face sometimes.

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I personally will always take up to 20% below my asking price when I do buy it now or best offer, it gets a bit odd when you'll have like 10 people watching an item but no one making an offer

 

Also never ever take low ball offers, thinking I just want to clear this out, low ballers seem to complain so much more than everyone else

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9 hours ago, RockyRaccoon said:

Pretty much my reason for never making an offer. While I assume I'd never make an insane low ball offer- I feel like some people take asking for less as a slap in the face sometimes.

I'd say that 10-20% off is in the range of a reasonable offer. The seller might counter with 10% off if you want 20%, but that's to be expected.

 

What's kind of weird to me is when the buyer counters on a low-priced item so that the difference between your last offer and theirs is like $2. At that point, I begin to think that the buyer just wants to "win" by getting the last word.

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eBay recently gave sellers an option to make an offer to people who are watching your auctions, so lately I've been trying this out on some of mine. Oddly I haven't really gotten any takers, even on my higher-priced items. Recently I made an offer of $45 to a prospective buyer for a game I was selling for $55, only to have the offer expire and then someone else bought it for full price. *shrugs*

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I've wondered about that as I've had a few dangle offers at me out of nowhere, but I haven't taken a single one because the cuts are stupid that show the seller is in fantasy or hoping still for a chump as they're just not serious.

 

When I see a best offer, or someone asks me like on here to make one, I won't.  I'm not comfortable with it.  I will if I feel the need privately message the seller, ask them about the item and close by asking I saw you had an offer, but I was wondering what would you be willing to take on it.  If they throw a number I'm comfy with, I'll enter it in the box, and if not, I move along.  I get it with a bizarre item that's hard to value, but if it's just some Pokemon game or some average find whatever and it's a known known, I don't think so.


Lately I've been a bit fed up with people having make offer options, but then they already price the item in the upper middle (or worse) of sold, and I come back with the lower/middle paid levels and get ignored, or the dick comes back with like 1-5% off at best.  It's clear they're time wasters using the box as bait.

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I offer as much as possible.  Saved lors by offering.  Like 5200 mario and space dungeon was 15ish.  I offered 10 and he accepted right away so I saved 5.  But sometimes like I lost my second genesis 8bitdo receiver recently.  So I found 20 with best offer.  I tried offering 15.  He declined and counter offered 19.50.  So stupid.  Why offer if you are not give up much.

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On 3/7/2020 at 9:06 PM, masschamber said:

I personally will always take up to 20% below my asking price when I do buy it now or best offer, it gets a bit odd when you'll have like 10 people watching an item but no one making an offer

 

Also never ever take low ball offers, thinking I just want to clear this out, low ballers seem to complain so much more than everyone else

 

Exactly what I do. 20% is usually my limit.

 

Sometimes I'm not sure how much something is worth so the best offer is another way (other than an auction) for buyers to let you know how much they think its worth.

 

When buying, if I see a best offer, I always offer at least 10% less and then negotiate. Usually I'm just trying to save the 10% state sales tax WA imposes. :)

Edited by mattsoft
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10 or 20% discount seems like a reasonable ask. It all depends on what the seller is looking for, of course. 

 

I've never been in a selling situation where someone made a best offer on something I've put up for sale. Either it gets grabbed instantly at the Buy It Now price, or the auction runs its course and sells for a lot more than I would have gotten as a BIN. 

 

What I generally get are people trying to make a side deal on the first day of an auction, "I'll buy this right now for $lowball" to which I always tell them, "Happy Bidding! Let's see how the auction plays out! I hope you win!" It's doubly fun to put these on the auction page so everyone can see them. 

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As a buyer, I've both tried submitting BO's and also just hit the BIN on listings with the BO option. It depends on what it is and how willing I am to take a risk. IIRC sellers have 48 hours to respond to a BO, and a lot of things can happen in that time. Someone else could hit the BIN, or submit a slightly higher offer than you (and maybe they even already have). It's in the seller's best interests to wait the full 48 hours until the offer expires to see if he gets anything better, so to me the question is "do I want this thing now, guaranteed, or do I want to take a chance it's still available 2 days from now at a slightly lower price?"

 

As a seller, I usually offer the BO option, and occasionally I get some takers but they're usually low-ball offers. Since I started using the "auto-reject if lower than" option, I don't see very many that come through at all. Usually I set the auto-reject threshold somewhere where anything above that, I'll take, so if an offer does come through I almost always take it.

 

Honestly, I usually initially price stuff as a seller a little higher than I think something's worth. (If I'm doing an auction, I do the opposite and start at $1, but I'm talking about fixed price listings.) You never know; sometimes prices drift upward for whatever reason, maybe there's something specific about my individual piece that I don't even know about that would make it more valuable, or maybe someone just really wants it on a given day. But that means if someone does submit a BO that's 10% lower, they'll usually get it. But they may have to wait that 48 hours so I make sure nobody else just hits the BIN...

 

Edited by spacecadet
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I'm not having much luck this last week with the feature.  I'm trying to get a loose copy of pokemon soulsilver and they're not budging.  There are heaps of them selling loose (not boots) in the $40-45 range, anyone I try and throw that offer on ignores it or comes back with something ridiculous.  Paying $65-80 for a loose one is a suckers racket given the evidence.  Persistence works.

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I have a few things listed for the first time in over a year, and I sent the people Watching my listings some offers at a nice discount. Nobody took me up on them. But I did recently accept an offer from a buyer on two items. I usually only do BIN listings with the make offer option, and have it set to require immediate payment. But when a seller accepts an offer, the buyer doesn't have to pay immediately. I discovered this early this past week when two of my items "sold" to the same "buyer", who turned out to be a flake who never paid and asked to cancel both sales. Meanwhile, it took the listings down so nobody else could buy the items, counted toward my sales limit (Ebay assures me that I won't be charged seller fees...), and wasted my time waiting around for payment that never came. I also had to wait 2 days before Ebay would let me "resolve the problem". So I had to relist the items, without any offers alliwed. Sure enough, one of them sold at the original BIN price to a quality buyer.

 

So in short, I'll never again have the offer option enabled on my BIN listings, because a bad buyer can use it to avoid paying for up to 2 days and a bad seller could use it to take down competing listings at no actual cost to themselves.

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Overall, I like the Best Offer option as a buyer and a seller. I never use it for anything rare that I really want because anything truly undervalued in most video game categories will be scooped up by a BIN within 30 minutes tops. I've been in the slightly-embarrassing situation of trying to save 20% or so with an offer, then coming back after a few minutes to pay full price because I feared someone else doing the same.

 

It can still be useful to submit an offer on an item you really want on the off-chance that the seller has set an auto-accept threshold. This is still a little risky because it will take you a little extra time to go back and buy the item at full price in case of no auto accept.

 

I think it has added back a little of the "fun" eBay had when it was mostly auctions. BIN really took away a lot of the fun, and Best Offer returns what a lot of folks liked about eBay: the feeling that you were getting a deal.

 

As a seller, it's helped me get rid of a lot of less-collectible/lower-condition stuff and still turn a small profit.

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Most of the time, if something is $60 and I send a best offer of, say, $45, I get back a counter offer of, like $57, and spent a day and a half waiting for it. Maybe it's worth it to roll the dice, but there's something frustrating about it. I have, done it when I have a good feeling about it, for whatever reason...don't mind waiting, only want it at around my best offer price, etc.

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18 hours ago, Swami said:

Most of the time, if something is $60 and I send a best offer of, say, $45, I get back a counter offer of, like $57, and spent a day and a half waiting for it. Maybe it's worth it to roll the dice, but there's something frustrating about it. I have, done it when I have a good feeling about it, for whatever reason...don't mind waiting, only want it at around my best offer price, etc.

If I had something listed for 60 and was offered 45 I would take it, 

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Just had five best offers in a row rejected. I was trying to buy four sticks of PC133 SDRAM. The seller is selling a pair for $15.99. I made of offer of $11.99 per pair, quantity 2, which may have been a little low. Rejected. Then I went to $12.00 because I thought the threshold was an even number. Nope. $13. Rejected. $14 was rejected too. And $15. So now I have to buy at $15.99, the regular price.

 

I'm guessing a $0.50 discount would be accepted? That's, what, 3%?

 

I didn't buy. I went rummaging and found the memory I needed in my own stock, lol.

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It would be amusing if ebay started forcing a policy if you accept best offer it has to be at least some percentage under asking or it's not even allowed.  I think you'd see an immediate drop in best offer options popping up.  Some clearly just abuse it for attention if all they're taking is like 1-5% less which is garbage.

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Regarding best offer, I sometimes get people making be an offer on my items. But the listing doesn't even have a best offer option. Thought that it would be something I could report, but doesn't seem to be the case. After telling them I am not taking offers, if they send another offer, they get added to the blocked list.

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On 3/17/2020 at 2:04 PM, taxman said:

Regarding best offer, I sometimes get people making be an offer on my items. But the listing doesn't even have a best offer option. Thought that it would be something I could report, but doesn't seem to be the case. After telling them I am not taking offers, if they send another offer, they get added to the blocked list.

sometimes ebay adds best offer to items because they feel like, 

anyway broke my rule about not accepting low balls and yep, took one and the guy is going to be a problem, 3 messages about getting it shipped in 1 day, while there is a flipping pandemic

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I actually haven't touched ebay in a month for selling.  With that bs going on with the virus and just having run out last month I didn't bother.  I'll probably start back up I'm just a mile from the post office and it's not hard to drop something inside of an out door mail slot from the car, boxes though, I imagine just walking in and using a clorox wipe as a glove would do it. ;)  My concern is, will be value, would I do better or worse given peoples income have dried up until this potentially multi-trillion dollar bailout happens.

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