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I have been running sales periodically over the past year but they don’t seem to make a lick of difference — I do not see an uptick in items sold in response to my sales. I just realized though that with my store of about 225 items, the relative few items I have with best offer tend to sell a bit better than items without best offer. So I am increasing the prices of about 50 items with the most watchers by about 20%, then adding the Or Best Offer option. Should be interesting to see if the best offer option works better than just putting items on sale!
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It’s a great experiment. Doesn’t hurt to try and pay attention to the results. We also see that sales really do nothing. We like Make Offer.
I do think that some sellers think it’s all about price. If an item is cheap enough, it’ll sell. This may be true for highly popular commodity items, but not true for us.
We’re selling weird, vintage, long tail items that very few people want. It doesn’t matter how low we put the price, we have to wait till that one person wants it. And those collectors often don’t want to pay the low bottom prices because they value the item and don’t trust cheapness.
If you sell clothes, it often is about the price because there is so much competition. Then it’s about who can live on the smallest profit and sell in volume.
What kind of items are you selling?
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I have best offer on everything. From the comments on the podcasts and posts, I learned to turn on the auto decline feature so that I didn’t get all worked up about the lowball offers. The auto decline is either set to the lowest amount I’ll feel comfortable accepting, or a default of 50% if I don’t really care. On items where I think that it’s a long shot to even sell the item, I’ve taken off the auto decline and just left it open to any offer. It has worked surprisingly well for me. A large proportion of my sales are best offer and generally I’m quite happy with the offers.
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I’ll be interested in your experience because I am kind of doing that experiment right now.
I have some china and household that I bought very cheaply last year – some of which has been listed since the spring and others since the summer. Very little has sold. At the beginning of this year, I decided to do a 50% off sale to get rid of some of it. I did sell one item, but probably the nicest item of the sale.
When the sale ended less than 2 weeks ago, I decided to add best offer instead. Just a few days later I got a $30 offer for a $49 item. This item would have been $24.50 during my 50% off sale! It is the only item that has sold since adding best offer, so I have yet to really say whether I have success or not. I will say that this is the first sale of that particular china pattern since I posted it in the spring last year.
Anyway, I’ll be taking whatever is left to a flea market this spring to get rid of it. This stuff takes up a lot of room. Now that I am buying with more knowledge, I need room for my new purchases.
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In the short term, my experiment has been working great. I am a best offer convert now. Prior to trying this, I was only using best offer for my more valuable items (over $200 or so). By adding best offer to many other items, my sales had a significant uptick over the weekend. I got a couple of people buying items outright, without making best offer, on items that had been languishing for months. I think ebay might be moving items with best offer higher up on views. I got about 10 best offers over the weekend that I countered and then the buyers lost interest, but I don’t care because I know I’ll get more best offers on those items. I sold a couple other other items by countering offers. Since I raised all the prices by $5 to $10 at the same time I added the best offer option, I really am not losing money by accepting reasonable best offers.
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