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Hi there!
I’m using “Buy it Now / Make Best Offer” exclusively on all the items I sold so far, but i noticed something while doing it:
Maybe it’s a very cultural thing (so the opinion of sellers, who sell a lot internationally would be very much appreciated), but my fellow country men aren’t into haggling that much, seen from a cultural standpoint.
As an example:
I offer a very rare video game controller of mine as a “BIN/MBO” item for about 89 €.
Right from the beginning i excluded all the offers under 40 €.What i experienced so far was the following:
Someone offers 45 €, i make an counter offer of 70 € and the whole negotiation collaps right from this point. No other counter offers follows my offer, the interested person never shows any interest anymore.
What would be the best strategy there ?
He offered me about 50 % of my asking price, i re-offered him 78 %, i thought in an imaginary dream world the negotiation would start from this point on and we would meet in the middle (let’s say at 65 €)Is this something uniquely German or do American eBay sellers experience the same ?
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I agree with Joe. When I get an offer that is less than I want, I will still think it through before submitting a counteroffer. If the cost of the item was low and it has been sitting for awhile, often I will accept.
However, I will still do counteroffers occasionally and sometimes can make a deal. I did this recently, and the buyer did come up in price. I was going to make a second counteroffer, but I saw he had the message “final offer”, so I decided to accept because I paid so little for it and it had been listed for about two months.
I think it might be an eBay culture rather than American or German or whatnot.
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I use best offer on a majority of the things I sell. I also have to agree with Joe is that what a buyer offers is typically all they are willing to pay. Its very rare that I get into a price negotiation with a buyer. With most of my best offer items I price my offer exclusions at 10% of my asking price just to offer something off the price. The side benefit to doing this is the history of offers (assuming multiples from different buyers) that allow me to see if I have priced my item to high relative to what the buyers are willing to pay.
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I personally don’t enjoy the make offer feature for all the reasons mentioned above. It hooks my attention, makes me doubt my pricing when I get low ball offers (which is the usual) and in the end results in no sale. Rarely do I get a reasonable offer and rarely a reply, unless it is a decline.
It is my opinion that some people do shotgun low ball offers just to see what deals they can snag. I know someone here on the form said that they personally do that — not judging, just reporting.
For my store, I don’t offer the make offer option except in some cases where I am willing to receive an offer. Alternatively I prefer to put items on sale or use the promotion feature to create sales.
COOL TIP: Someone here on the forum suggested that if you get an offer by email you can put the item on sale for the buyer. In this way others see the price drop as well and the buyer may feel more pressed to act if they really want the item. This week I had a buyer ask for a best price on an item via the email system. I put the item on sale for 6% off for 24 hours, notified the buyer, and left the ball in his court. He was happy with the discount and purchased the item.
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In some cases, you may be right to doubt your pricing. Someone made a low offer on a pair of shoes last week. We went back and forth a few times and I decided to research the shoes again. Multiple pair of this specific shoe had sold within 90 days. I was out of alignment with solds and current listings. I originally priced significantly higher because these were a large, harder to find size. In the end I counted lower and they happily took my $50 counter, which was still higher than all the sold listing comparables. These shoes had sat for about a year.
As Jay always says, it depends on if you are hungry for a sale.
Right now, I’m not hungry….I’m HAAAWWWWWNNNNGGGRRRRYYYY!
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I would offer to always counter the offer at the price you are looking for even if you are not concerned with making the sale. Ebay is making the time point in which sellers answer offers a selling point, so it may behove you as a seller to answer offers so buyers wanting to make real offers see that you respond and send offers.
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75% of our offers are like you describe: buyer offers half of the price, we counter, then they’re silent. The buyer is just testing the water.
20% of buyers send us an offer that’s 80%+ of the purchase price. We often immediately accept these.
5% of the offers start low, we counter, and they counter with a higher price which we eventually accept.
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Wondering if anyone here uses the “decline offer” much? Sometimes I just decline an offer that’s too low and move on. Normally these too low offers are 50% or less of the asking price. Sometimes I don’t hear from the buyers again but many times I get a second offer at a higher price. I sell using best offer quite a lot and have wondered about the etiquette. One time I did get a terse message from a buyer asking why I would decline instead of counter. I just blocked them because I didn’t want to deal with that. But I have wondered if declining is some kind of poor eBay etiquette.
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I can offer you my perspective on this as a buyer.
I recently submitted an offer on an item. The seller listed it at $90 OBO, plus REALLY high shipping. This item usually sells for around $70, and my offer was for $65, taking into consideration the over-priced shipping. After a day and a half, the seller finally declined my offer. No counter. Just decline. That is really frustrating. What’s the point of Best Offer if you aren’t willing to work with the buyer a little? It takes just a few seconds to counter offer. I’d really like to buy this item, but now I’m annoyed because it feels like the seller is playing some sort of game. It makes me not want to buy from them at all. I’ll probably end up paying more than what I originally planned because I’d rather buy from a seller that doesn’t make me feel like they are playing games.
I get 50% offers all the time. Sometimes I take them, sometimes I counter and say “I can’t do 50%, but I can do 75%/80%/whatever”. Engage with the buyer a little. Buyers generally aren’t trying to put one over on you by offering what you think is a low ball offer. A lot of them probably pick a dollar amount out of the air and make that the offer, with the expectation that the seller will probably counter offer.
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I decline bids automatically which are at 50 % of the price i’m asking for.
Not a big fan of low-ball offers & trying to negotiate the price up, which is most of the times a fruitless endeavour anyway.
Still i’m a bit surprised that haggling isn’t common at all at eBay, cuz this is what I’m enjoying the most (unless the interested buyer begins with really hilarious low ball offers).
Do other sellers also experience the following behaviour:
An interested buyer puts your item on the watch list almost right at the start of the listening period and then never does anything again (until probably the end of the auction)?I got some items in my inventory, where i do experience exactly this kind of behaviour at the moment.
Since i’m relatively new i’d be interested in the motivation of the interested buyer in doing so?
Do they wait until the end of the auction, cuz they do expect a sudden price drop (motivated by the action of getting rid of inventory from the side of the vendor ?) or do they want to up the pressure on the vendor (lol, if so) by offering a low ball offer with the argument that this specific item didn’t sell ?
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I think you may be overthinking it. Buyers will watch things for lots of different reasons. It’s not a negotiating strategy. I will watch items just as a book mark.
Im assuming you’re fairly new to selling on eBay? If it bothers you when something doesn’t sell right away, my advice is to get used to this, especially if you’re selling with eBay auctions. There’s a lot of competition out there.
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I agree with Liz. We always counter the first offer. Why not? Take two seconds.
We have been known to decline offers from buyers who raise their offer by $1 on each counter offer. The item cost $100. They offer $10. We counter at $90. They counter at $11. We counter at $90 again and say they need to come up farther. They counter at $12. At this point the buyer is playing a game that we dont want to play.
You’re allowed to decline any offer at anytime. You can block any buyer you want. But if you are willing to accept accepts, you need to play the game a little bit.
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I think an issue with “best offer” is many sellers believe having that in their listing helps their listings rise to the top in search rankings. I’ve submitted best offers within one dollar of list price and had them rejected. So really those sellers were not taking “best offers”
I do not use best offers on my listings generally, but one strategy I’ve used and had some limited success with is to put best offers on items that are ending within 48 hours.
I have also found when accepting best offers on items I’m selling especially if it was an offer thru messaging that some buyers will accept, pay, then cancel. This happened to me last week. Don’t know why this is a continuing issue, but I would guess ebay is showing the buyers links to the same items (on ebay or off ebay) with lower prices after the sale.
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