Traffic and sales are way down across the whole ebay platform right now, so I totally feel your pain, as I'm sure many others do as well. But you're making your situation much worse by selling things for no profit, and playing games with "Best Offer." Any time you put best offer on a listing, of course people are going to offer less, they think that's what you wanted them to do.
If your profits are as bad as you say they are, then why not raise your prices? While I can't speak for everyone else, I definitely don't work for free, and I never negotiate on my prices. I too sell comic books, along with video games, movies, etc, and I always factor in all costs when setting my prices, and buyers can forget making offers.
All the time I see other video game sellers selling games for next to nothing, and its obvious from their pricing they make no profit on anything. While my sales aren't great either, I make a good profit on everything I sell. One game I recently sold for $50 I paid $1 for!
What you could try doing is diversifying the the types of items you sell. As the old saying goes, never put all your eggs in one basket. The more options you have for buyers, the more potential to get a sale.
Either way, best offer just screams "I'm not confidant in my item selling, please low-ball me", which doesn't exactly put confidence in buyers to bid more.
If there's one thing I will agree with, there aren't many buyers out there, that's for sure. Given the current state of our economy, many consumers are willing to spend, but they only want bargains. Despite all the bogus claims from economists and the media about how wonderful our economy is, the economic reality facing Americans today is far different than what the news tells us. The average American is flat broke! Comes here to Missouri, half our population lives in poverty.
You said it yourself, "I rarely make a sale over $10." Yep, and its for the very reasons I stated above, people can't afford to spend much, they're broke.
