Advantage/disadvantage to listing offering "Best Offer"

[every2ndcounts]

Any Suggestions on whether to list with Best Offer, or should I just make offers to those "watching"??? 

[chapeau-noir]

I don't use best offer, but I'll send offers out to people watching from time to time.

My best advice for actually having 'best offer' is to set parameters for lowest you will accept - that's a simple setting.

The other thing to be aware of is that you may end up chasing people for payment, waiting for days or whatever.  I'm not sure what the percentage of payment lag is, but it's probably not all that high, it just gets discussed here a lot, but it is an absolute reality.

You might try simply sending offers and see how that goes and then go to best offer on your listings.

[heckofagame]

Best offer is ok if you set the minimum offer for each item, otherwise you get non-stop low-balling. 

If you do send offers to your watchers, there is a check box for counteroffers. You will need to decide if you want to allow them. 

[femmefan1946 · Accepted solution]

Watchers watch.

Buyers buy.

In my opinion, Best Offer works better.

I set my BOs with acceptable and  not acceptable parameters, so that I don't see the lowball offers and the acceptable ones are automatically, errrr, accepted.

So if I list a $100 item, but would accept $90 for it, I set the acceptable parameter at $90 (or 89.99 or $90.01) and the refusal at $85.

Why not $89.99? Because if something has been in stock for ages, I might consider the lower bid, but not if it went up yesterday.

The unacceptable offers get a polite letter, sent automatically by eBay. I have noticed that some buyers have bid two or three times, so the letter must be polite and encouraging. I've never seen it myself.

Now the bad news.

Promoted Listings work better than either.

Dang.

A Canadian seller has been experimenting with PL vs discounts. Annoyingly, he finds the PL works better, at a lower cost, than customer discounts.
https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/experiment-with-almost-give-away-listing-pondering-probl...
#6 of 13

Still preliminary, and you can see by the date of the thread that he started a while back and has not completed it yet.

From my own perspective, PL works about as well at 2% as at the eBay suggested rate.

And while PL listings don't necessarily sell either, they do pull potential customers to my sites, and I have anecdotally, had more sales since I started using PL.  (Anecdote is not data.)

[coolections]

I vote NO and NO. I would never use best offer and I will never give a watcher an offer. I pride myself on ethical sales and let everyone have the same chance of getting the item for the same asking price. IMO if you are willing to drop the price then just DO IT and forget about it.

[ms.rodriguez*]

I hate best offers but unfortunately buyers love them and they have learned to watch items inorder to get a lower offer.  So I have learned to list everything 2-10 dollars higher inorder to get a best offer. Most of my sales in the last week have been either from a best offer or because I sent an offer to a watcher.   As a buyer, I have also learned to put an item on a watch list.  Most of the sellers will send the offer and then if I really like the item(usually a diecast car), I will buy it.      I prefer to do best offers than to use promoted listings.  Today's buyers are not in a rush to buy stuff in the market that I mainly sell in (diecast and other toy vehicles.)

[chapeau-noir]

For a long time I've built in a certain percentage of discounts/offers into item price.  I sell a lot on Poshmark and it's a lot of haggling and I do the same thing there. 

[inhawaii]

Just my opinion....

BEST OFFER:

I'm hoping to get $25 but I might consider taking less.

If you're not in a rush to get it,

why don't you make me a lower offer and we can go back and fourth

and we may or may not come to an agreement on the price.

If we come to an agreement, then I will give you  4 days for you to pay me.

NO BEST OFFER:

The price is $25.  Buy it and I will ship it to you now.

Sure accepting best offers be more attractive to some buyers, but is it really worth the hassle?

[ckimodog]

@every2ndcounts 

Advantage is maybe the item will sell.  Disadvantage is some sport bidder makes an offer, you accept and they wind up not paying.  Advice? Not worth the headache.  Best offers attract scammers and sport bidders as much as auction style listings. I personally avoid them. 

Happy Selling. 

[dbfolks166mt]

     I quit using OBO long ago. I just didn't have time to deal with the back and forth haggling. I use the auction format almost exclusively and set my starting price at the lowest price I will take. Even with that I on occasion get an unsolicited offer. Most of the time I ignore them and do not even respond. 

     You have 111 active items and quite a few followers. If you enable OBO on all of those, even with automatic rejection settings, you could find yourself inundated with offers. 

[kabilab]

In 1992, after 29 yrs. in direct sales, I tired of traveling and decided to try retailing; fortunately for me,I was an immediate success. One reason was my decision to price my products as inexpensively as possible and then to hold the line. When I began liquidating non-saleable store products on e-Bay, I decided to forego OBO and have never regretted that decision.

[m60driver]

I often allow best offers when I list an item the higher end of the trading range and I am willing to take a bit less.  I will also allow best offer as a starting point before actually lowering the price if an item has not sold after a few months.  And allowing best offers is a good alternative to an auction when you have listed an item that has very few, if any, comps.

[yuzuha]

Listing with Best Offer tells your buyers that either you:

1) Don't know what your item is actually worth, OR

2) You don't care what it's really worth, you just want it gone

Which means you're going to get loads of buyers who (rightfully) assume that your price isn't your actual price and that you can be talked down. Is that a headache you really want to deal with?

[every2ndcounts]

Thanks, I think that is what may have happened to me. My other thought was, someone wanted my item down because they had the same item, and they got rid of me (their competition)

[every2ndcounts]

Thanks. I often thought about the advantages of auctions, especially the fact that I may reduce the number of trips to post office, since virtually all would/could pay on the same day.