Keep or Do Away with Best Offer Option?

[loose_goose_garage]

For the past 10 years or so I've always done Buy it Now with Best Offer Option on all of my listings

Over the past couple years I've noticed more people seem to be just hitting Buy it Now, instead of making offers and going back and forth haggling.

However, I'd say half of the offers I do receive are 50% or less of the Buy it Now price. I just decline these and don't respond to them. 

Looking at seller metrics, for 2024 so far my sales are:

65.2% Buy it Now, No Offer

31.8% Best Offer

3.0% Seller Initiated Offer.

And Going back to 2023:

64.1% Buy it Now, No Offer

35.3% Best Offer

0.6% Seller Initiated Offer

I see many other sellers of similar items to mine don't use the Best Offer option, their items seem to sell well, and it has me wondering if I should drop it as well.

One of the main issues on my end is offering free shipping, obviously that cost is built into the price. So my Buy it Now price is built to cover shipping to the West Coast (I'm in New England). 

In turn, if a buyer is closer, I am more willing to haggle a better price than someone that wants to haggle the same price but is on the other end of country, due to higher shipping costs. More often than not this leads to the farther away buyers going back and forth with offers a couple dollars more than their previous one and just wasting time for both of us.

Any advice?

[dbfolks166mt]

     I am a small seller but I quit using OBO a long time ago for a number of reasons, time management being the biggest one which is the same reason I use the auction format almost exclusively. I simply had better things to do than respond to offers. 

     There is really no one best answer but you have over 1,000 items listed a lot with OBO so I can't imagine the number of offers you get or have to deal with. If you are priced in a competitive range in the market place and/or have a unique item I am not sure what the logic is behind using OBO. 

     With regards to using free shipping, although not part of your basic question, I seldom use free shipping for a number of reasons and I am also on the east coast. Using free shipping means I would have to factor in the highest potential shipping cost into the selling price which of course would be to the west coast. Doing so would result in a disadvantage to east coast buyers and possibly putting the cost of my item out of the competitive price range. The other issue with free shipping, although it amounts to small change to the buyers, is about 1/2 of the states do not charge sales tax on shipping when it can be separately identified as part of the total cost of the item, which also means you as a seller are not paying FVF on the sales tax on the shipping when there is none. 

[mr_lincoln]

@loose_goose_garage 

Great post and subject!

-I have NEVER used Best Offer.

-I get offers messaged to me from time to time on BIN and Auction items.  For BINs I either decline or use the Reply with Offer button but do not accept counter offers.

-I also get offers messaged to me on Auctions, the good news there is that they are higher than the starting price.  I decline those and invite the customer to place a bid and they might get it for less than there offer.

-I used the Send Offers eligible feature for a while but discontinued it in April this year.

-If we were able to vote I would vote to get rid of the Best Offer feature.

[chevymontecarlo88]

I never had any issues with OBO as far as sales. Typically i would list my items without it for 30 days and than add depending on the item/price. Lowballers will show up at your door if you do not put minimums. Since i do not have multiple sales per order, sometimes i would add immediate payment if it was something with many watchers or expensive. Depending on the price of the item, typically i do not offer free shipping unless there is a lot of margin and/or the shipping would be nominal. I also pull some items from the site if the market is flooded/low priced and wait until others are gone.

I don't think you need to apply this to everything you list. Availability, rarity and condition may determine what the fair market price so its not always the lowest price wins.(for items i sell) If it is a new item you list, i would say do not offer it until you determine you may want to take less. (2 weeks - 4 weeks?) Some will discount and that is fine but i like to keep the price and opt for OBO without discounting price. If it does not move i may remove the OBO and lower the price depending on the item. I also use best offers to reach out to potential buyers (message offers before declining) to try to get a line of communication going. Sometimes it leads to sales and sometimes i get crickets. It is a tool but if used improperly, can cost you margin. Just like Promoted Listings. Not for everyone and may take some time to implement properly to your own listings.

On items that are stagnant, i also suggest when you take pictures of the items you list, take a couple extra ones that will be used for the first picture that shows up in the search. You can rotate these at times to give your listings a different look. If my item is not moving but other listings have, i may consider using titles of completed comp/sold items.

[jg.mason]

When I started out I didn't use it. Ebay then kept adding it to my listings so I thought I'd give a try.

Wow, what a pain all I was getting was lowball offers and wasting time responding to them.

So then I tried the auto accept and auto decline feature, that worked better and I made sales using it but I just didn't like the extra time it took when I was listing items.

So now I think I might still have one item with make offers turned on and it's so buried in the search results that it doesn't matter.

If I was selling on here for a living I would use it because I believe it helps sales.

[mr_lincoln]

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@jg.mason wrote:

When I started out I didn't use it. Ebay then kept adding it to my listings so I thought I'd give a try.

Wow, what a pain all I was getting was lowball offers and wasting time responding to them.

So then I tried the auto accept and auto decline feature, that worked better and I made sales using it but I just didn't like the extra time it took when I was listing items.

So now I think I might still have one item with make offers turned on and it's so buried in the search results that it doesn't matter.

If I was selling on here for a living I would use it because I believe it helps sales.

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@jg.mason 

It drives prices down but if one has enough margin to absorb the lower price then that would be okay.  I price Auctions the same way I price BINs so a one bid sale on an auction is basically the same as a BIN sale.  The advantage to auctions is more bids increases the profit margin.

[stanley_vermin]

I'll toss my two cents into the hat. I sell to support my hobby. It's not how I make a living.

TLDR - OBO is overall good, sometimes annoying and certain markets it works better in.

I sell tcg's, mostly mtg, and for my template I have OBO set on by default. I mostly do BIN. I do very few auctions as most of the prices are already set. Not sure if my opinion helps since I focus mostly on cards and occasionally books. These things don't have a completely static price.

I personally like the OBO as I have several repeat buyers that also know market prices and if the prices have dropped they will send an offer. I also have my shipping free. When one of the repeat buyers buys from me they know I will give them a discount when they buy several items as I can combine my shipping.  That is the good part.

The annoying part is getting those low ball offers. I ignore them and rarely ever decline them. The reason is that if they want to buy a different one but there offer is still there then they have to go and retract the offer and give a reason. A friend of mine said that he will make low ball offers on cards that have OBO and occasionally someone will bite. Now what sucks for them is when they toss out all these offers and multiple people accept is that you have now spent money on stuff you don't want or you have to ask to have it canceled. I personally don't want someone to buy something they don't want so I will cancel if asked unless I already shipped. It also helps when I have cards that aren't very popular or if I need some stuff to move.

I had someone go through all of my listings and they made 50% offers on over 40 items. I waited til the following day at around the 23rd hour and declined all but 12. The cards I accepted had been listed with no views for a long time. Turns out no one else took his low ball offers so he ended up buying what he needed and didn't cancel any of his bad offers. I did cancel his orders and checked to see if he had bought from me before. He had as I price my stuff competitively. I blocked him after that. I don't want a customer that is going to cause a headache for me.

Ebay has consistently been heading the way of having no interaction between buyer and seller. Some buyers forget that there are actual people involved. I want to develop relationships with people that buy from me and working out deals that are mutually beneficial for both parties helps with that. The OBO is another tool to help make that work.

[rosszonebricks]

I've used 'Best Offer' long enough to be on Team: Never Again.  Of course *what* a person sells makes a difference too.  There is no one single best cookie cutter answer.

Several factors:

1) I personally think it flat out broadcasts 'Hey I've overpriced my items, haggle with me!'  Even if a buyer doesn't use it, they are left to think you intentionally took advantage of them.

2) eBay's own decades long culture.    SELLERS have helped create the 'buy it now' problem.   I see complaints about 'low ball offers', but when an item is $100, and a seller accepts a $50 offer.... you can see how it sets that buyer up for all time to think 'every seller is overcharging me!' so the low ball offer haggling continues.

3) Marketing 101, in a way.   Not having Best Offer enabled, it's a way to set yourself up as a 'premium brand'.  "I know what my stuff is worth, and this is my price."  

[kensgiftshop]

I don't use best offer as a seller or buyer.

As a seller, my price is my best offer.

As a buyer, I know sellers that have best offer has already jacked up their price to make up for their best offer, so I try to stay away from sellers with best offer.

It's all up to the seller/buyer, some like it and some don't.

[loose_goose_garage]

When I started selling, I relied more on the income of eBay than I do now, in addition to not having the room for inventory storage that I have available to me today. So for me the Best Offer helped to keep the sales and products constantly moving. Through the years, I moved, became more organized, and don't rely on the eBay income as much so I started to stick closer to my original prices, depending on how long it's been listed, location, etc. I just never sat down and thought about taking off the Best Offer option until today when I was looking at my sales metrics and noticed that it doesn't seem to be making sales, more of just an inconvenience of dealing with low ballers.

For the shipping, I switched to 'Free' years ago when it was all the rage, and eBay put them higher in the search results. I doubt it really holds true anymore. My biggest issue of switching to charged shipping is I sell car parts of various sizes and weights. Often times I need to customize boxes for them, and to get an accurate shipping weight and dimensions without fully packing up the item just doesn't seem feasible to me. Also I don't have the room to store the parts if they are all boxed up.

Do you just weigh the item, add some weight for packing materials, and then enter rough estimates on the dimensions based on item? And how accurate is the eBay calculated shipping? IE: will the amount they charge the buyer cover the cost of actual shipping, and is it based on the eBay shipping label discount we get or the In Person Post Office/ UPS/ FedEx rates?

[loose_goose_garage]

That's why I originally started using it, to help with sales, which I believe it did, but I think now it seems to be less helpful than it used to be. Could be a mix of consumers having the "Buy it Now and I can get it sooner" rather than make an offer, wait up to 24 hours for response, deal with counteroffers, etc. and the fact that I price most of my items at the lower end of the available similar items, short of worse condition or different items, so that's where I think it has become less useful as my prices are pretty competitive already. Which is the other reason I was thinking about dropping it.

[luckythewinner]

Any advice?

Barring a switch to calculated shipping, IMHO only you can judge whether the hassle of negotiating is worth the possibility of losing up to 35% of your sales.

[loose_goose_garage]

I think your point #3 is what really made me look into this, seeing others in same market doing BIN only, no Best Offer, and their items still sell for good prices.

Along with avoiding the low baller buyers, I agree that even I as the seller have seen relatively local buyers purchase items from me that I could have gave them a much better price due to shipping costs being lower, but they just buy it for full price with no gripes. It almost makes me feel bad, like I kind of 'took advantage' but in reality they could have made an offer, they just needed it/ saw the value and are happy to receive it safe and sound. It's the buyers that offer 50% of original price that even if you accepted it would still have complaints or something to say regardless. Just the way it goes

[strugglinlikeyou]

I do not use best offer. I used to sell at flea markets and haggling was understood to be part of the environment. I didn't like it because I had to inflate my prices a bit to allow for the discount seekers. So the hagglers got a good deal and those who did not haggle overpaid. 

[chariot_badges]

I keep data.

I'm a data kind of guy.

I have always used OFFER. 

But, I limit the amount of time I spend on an offer.

I use offer like I play poker:  Fold early and fold often.  Only play a hand that has a chance of winning.

So, I have an item for sale for $20, and some meathead offers $5.

That is an automatic decline with a comment that I never sell for less than a 20% discount.

If he's not smart enough to know that I won't sell it for pennies and offers again with $6, I decline and block.  I just don't have time for that crap. 

If he offers $12, I counter with $15 and say that I never discount more than 20% and that is my best offer.

If he then offers $13, I decline and block.  I just don't have time for that crap.

That being said ... about 30% of all my sales begin with a BIN offer.

The trick is to recognize when a 'buyer' is raising their hand and saying, "Hey, I'm gonna be trouble.  Yup, I'm going to complain about shipping time, wrapping materials and condition ... all day long."

I use OFFER ... I don't let OFFER use me.