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Tagged: best offer
- This topic has 17 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 8 months ago by almasty.
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11/01/2017 at 7:15 pm #24743
What’s your Best offer strategy?
When you counter, do you just respond with number or include message?
have you notice any difference if you include any appreciative message for their interest and offer?
Whats your strategy with very low ball offers?
do you use auto accept/decline? if so whats your experience? do you recommend?
in your experience, what have worked and what to avoid with Best Offer?
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11/01/2017 at 7:35 pm #24744
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11/01/2017 at 8:58 pm #24750
I recommend the information Jay and Ryanne posted. For me, I don’t accept best offers from people with zero feedback. In my experience, they almost never pay. Steve Schultz gave good advice about delaying your response to best offers sometimes because sometimes the person will get impatient and just pay full price. I use auto decline for amounts below my minimum. I don’t use Best Offer very often only because I prefer to minimize the notifications on my phone.
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11/01/2017 at 10:53 pm #24784
Use the auto accept / reject function. Never make a counter offer via the message system. If you do that it will lock you out of the listing until the buyer accepts or rejects your counter offer. If the buyer doesn’t respond at all you will be locked out of the listing for 48 hours. I learned this lesson a couple years ago the hard way.
If you want counter a best offer first decline then write in the ebay message what dollar amount you will accept. This works even better if you have auto accept turned on.
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11/02/2017 at 9:27 am #24821
J&R, thanks for podcast info.
I know this is few years ago, do you still use these strategies? Time for update podcast? 🙂
From you and other members, wanted to know how you respond to counter? do you just include a counter offer number or include message as well? what are the Dos and Dont for message?
Any other tips?
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11/02/2017 at 5:13 pm #24857
Dealing “make offer” is pretty simple for us. We have 6000 items and might get 5 offers on a busy day. We enjoy them because it feels like our store has action.
We know that when we counter, 90% of counters dont go anywhere. Writing a message to the person doesnt help. They dont care wheat we have to say. People just want deals.
So we take the first offer very seriously. We have been known to take 1/2 price offers because the item is old and we’re hungry.
If you dont want a lot of messages, just set up auto decline/accept. No big deal.
- This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Jay.
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11/03/2017 at 7:57 am #24899
I do best offer. I love getting offers. How I respond to an offer changes with my mood, the age of the item, the activity on the item, and how bad I want a sale among other things.
Sometimes I think it is annoying to get a really lowball offer, and sometimes I think it is hilarious.
Bottom line, the offer system is kind of like a game to me.
As a buyer, I hate the auto accept/decline. It is so impersonal. I’ll make an offer or two and then either write the person or just move on to someone else’s item. I can tell you that many folks have lost out on my business because they had auto accept/decline turned on. I can also tell you that I’ve had many great sales with folks who started with a really low offer. I think some of them are just testing to see if I have auto decline turned on. I remember one item in particular – it was a $100 item. I got an offer for like $5-10. Instead of declining I countered at $90 and they accepted and paid immediately. If I had auto decline I would not have had that great sale.
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11/03/2017 at 11:18 am #24917
For clothes, I use the auto accept/auto decline. Most of the price points are below $40, so I don’t want to waste the time with lots of $5 + Free Shipping offers. Plus, I like that if I’m working, shopping or sleeping, the sale can be made and the buyer can pay.
For higher dollar items and all of Veronica’s stuff, we will use the auto decline at around 50%. The rest is negotiated.
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11/03/2017 at 7:05 pm #24947
So do you include any message in your counter?
Retro, what percentage of initial low ball offer end up in sale for you? do you use any auto accept/decline?
TSatt, For auto accept decline, do you use same/similar number for both or have a gap to allow for negotiation? any example will help 🙂
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11/03/2017 at 7:30 pm #24953
For low dollar items, no gap. So a shirt that is for sale at $24, I would do $17/$16.99.
For higher dollar items, I will gap. So a $125 suit may have $90/$75.
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11/06/2017 at 10:58 am #25105
I use no auto accept/decline. Negotiating is part of the fun! The more you do it, the better you get.
I rarely get true lowball offers (25% of asking price or less). I don’t consider 50% of asking price to be a low ball in this game. Best guess, half of them end up a sale through negotiation. -
11/08/2017 at 6:27 am #25247
thanks for your recommendations! Removing auto accept/decline helped as I was able to get few more sales with more negotiations.
what are your strategies for counter offer to first offer? Here are my observations:
– Countering first offer with meeting half way
– If a buyer keeps countering, stay firm to last counter, they will run out of offers and may accept your last counter
– Free Shipping may helpwhat are yours?
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11/08/2017 at 9:49 am #25257
Usually people offer their best price the first time. I’m not sure there are any strategies for countering. We just put the price we’re willing to accept.
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07/18/2018 at 1:49 pm #45741
I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant (and/or jinx my future best offer counters) but I have excellent luck with counteroffering best offers and I wanted to share how I respond.
Here’s what I say: “Hello and thank you so much for your offer! I hope you will find my counteroffer a fair one for this wonderful (fill in your item name here). It is in (fill in the condition here) and (fill in flattering adjectives here). My best to you, (fill in your first name here)”
Lately I have around an 80% acceptance of my best offer counteroffers to buyers which is significantly higher than what I’ve heard is the average for other sellers. I think buyers like the personal touch message, signing your name and schmoozing by reiterating why they were attracted to the item enough in the first place to put in an offer.
I realize for big sellers who get a lot of best offers this would probably take more time than you would be willing to put into it. But it’s not too much work, just copy and paste, changing a few words here and there and not much time invested for small sellers like me. I don’t get multiple best offers each day.
Or possibly my luck is just due to my pricing? I always try to be competitive on price. Anyway, it may be worth a try!
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07/18/2018 at 6:35 pm #45783
Can you give an example of a recent success?
–What was the item
–how much was it priced at
–how much did they offer
–what counter offer did they accept?
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07/19/2018 at 5:37 am #45810
Lamp priced at £55 including P&P.
Offer received of £15 (which didn’t cover postage and fees)
Rejected offer outright
Received message “You turned down my offer but you didn’t say why”
Replied with an explanation and a counter-offer of £40
Received offer of £20- I didn’t bother replying
Customer then buys lamp at original price of £55.
I also had a problem with accepting an offer on another item, only for the customer to not pay. I cancelled the order after three days and sold the item for a slightly higher price. Ended up with a defect. I should’ve done a non-paying.
I haven’t tried it, but I wonder whether, instead of accepting an offer, reducing the BIN to the offer and saying to the customer “Go for it, before someone else does”. Has the advantage that they actually have to pay promptly.
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07/24/2018 at 10:39 am #46023
Something I recently learned about offers:
I don’t do best offers on most items but when I get a message asking if I would consider lowering the price on an item, and the item is still fresh or it is seasonal (e.g. Christmas, etc.), I write back thanking them for their interest and letting them know that if the item does not sell within a couple of months or after the Holiday, I will definitely reduce the price.
So far this has been successful as the buyers seem to appreciate this handling of their communication. And in one case the person decided to purchase the $150.00 item at full price plus shipping rather than take the chance that it will be gone.
Just wanted to share this in case it helps anyone else.
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07/24/2018 at 2:29 pm #46040
When I buy an item, research it and see that similar items sold for very high in the past, I’ll price the item just as high as well and add a best offer option to it. I don’t know if someone will pay the exact same high amount for a similar item 5 years down the road, especially when there are no similar comparables.
This has resulted in offers within 24 hours at half or 75% of the price. These are items that I would have normally listed and sold for 15-30 before researching so thoroughly. With the higher prices, I am asking 100-300 and getting 50-150 usually within a day.
I usually just take the offer because it is much more than I was expecting to get for the item no matter what. They get a “deal,” a very quick buy “before anyone else can come in and get it,” and I get more money than I was ever expecting to get. Win-win.
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