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?

[loose_goose_garage]

As a buyer I'm the same, I don't make offers, if I want it and the price is reasonable to me I'll buy it.

As a seller, I think that is part of my issue, and why I am leaning towards doing away with it, is I price almost all of my items right at the lower end of available items, dependent on condition obviously. I do this so I can make money, but also not sit on the product for too long that it becomes a hindrance. So when I receive offers of 50-75% of my Buy it Now price, I am very reluctant to even counter offer, as my price is already competitive to other listings available.

And like you said, the price is the price, the buyers that see the value/ have the need for the item will buy it as long as it's a reasonable price for both parties in my opinion.

[loose_goose_garage]

That's what I'm considering also, I just don't see how to reasonably calculate shipping for all my items.

[loose_goose_garage]

That's exactly the way I do it in a sense, 20% is where I draw the line and that's if it's been up for a while or the market is very saturated. 

I've learned those people that offer a dollar or 2 higher than initial low offer are going to be trouble through and through. I have no problem declining and blocking them as you said, it's just not worth the hassle.

[itsjustasprain]

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@loose_goose_garage wrote:

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.

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Over in my selling account I NEVER add the Make Offer option. To me that simply says 'I do not really believe my asking price. So start haggling to find out how much less I will take for it.'

All that does is make sure that no one will pay the asking price (unless I have WAY underestimated the value of something) but instead will go through a round of haggling that I really do not want to entertain and do not have time for either.

If I am selling at a garage sale that is different - you can haggle all you like and its over and done with in a minute or two - but on-line you may be waiting around for the other party to respond, ect.

As a BUYER I look at it differently. If a seller has Make Offer showing then I will almost always go for that and see how much less I can get it for. Usually the seller will agree to around 20% off in my experience. I have occasionally decided to not mess around and to lunge for the BuyItNow button instead - but that is only because its a killer deal anyway and I dont want someone else to grab it first. (I suspect that makes the seller wonder if he should have asked more for it in the first place.)

So back on the seller side here - I do not use Make Offer and I doubt I ever will. I do sometimes take a lower offer in messaging for something that has been sitting around for a while but generally not. If someone is persisting with lowball offers I can usually get rid of them by pointing them to cheaper listings by other sellers. Those other ones are generally not as good as my examples but at least I am helping the lowball buyer to get what he pays for. 😉

[cardsforauction]

Best Offer was good before, when you can easily send counteroffers back and forth on many items you wanted to buy.  Now, I think buyers don't do counteroffers much because of the fear of their accounts being automatically charged because of auto-pay.  You make several counteroffers and who knows what auto-pay will do to your account.  The counteroffers was a good negotiation tool for buying, but I stay away from it because I don't trust the auto-pay system.  People on here will say don't try to buy stuff you can't afford.  That's not what we are talking about, it's the freedom to negotiate with counteroffers and it was great for buyers.  I believe the Best Offer is still good, but don't expect buyers to use counteroffer as much because I believe they are nervous because of the reason I mentioned.  Your best bet, just send the potential buyers Eligible Offers. 

[chevymontecarlo88]

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@kensgiftshop wrote:

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.

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Everyone has there own way of buying and this is not a criticism of the way you do. I love using best offer when purchasing. Many times when sellers list an item 20% over market (as an example), reality will set in and eventually they will lower there price. Sometimes they see a mint item and assume there very good condition is the same. (happens all of the time) I select who i make offers from and how long the item has been listed amongst other variables. I find great deals and sometimes make great relationships because i take the time to educate the difference in pricing. I have the time to hunt for items so many might not find this a good way to spend there own time. YMMV

[chevymontecarlo88]

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@chariot_badges wrote:

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

Well put.

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[brightlightbookseller]

We've adopted a hybrid system for offers.  For new listings, we just put it up at the price we want, no offers.  We still get messages sometimes offering lower amounts, and if they're reasonable we can either open it up to offers or just send one through messages if eBay lets us.  Once a listing has been up a few months, we open it up to offers, because at that point we either priced it too high or there isn't much demand, and usually opening it up to offers prompts it to sell, even if it's for a little lower than we initially wanted.  We then lower the price gradually using sales over a year time period per listing (except some more expensive items that we manage the price manually), and when it hits a floor pricing for us (the lowest we'll go) we turn off offers.  Actually, we turn it off if the highest reasonable offer amount would be below what we'd accept, such as an item that's down to $10.50, few people want to offer just $0.50 off, and we don't want to go lower than that for most listings, so we turn off offers.

It's working well for us, a little bit of work to manage, but I mostly turn offers on/off about once a week and in bulk, so it doesn't take too long.  I also usually set the auto-accept to a percentage of the original price so we don't have to manually respond to offers we would definitely accept anyways, though I haven't been using auto-decline because it doesn't play nicely with sales.

[kensgiftshop]

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@chevymontecarlo88 wrote:

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@kensgiftshop wrote:

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.

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Everyone has there own way of buying and this is not a criticism of the way you do. I love using best offer when purchasing. Many times when sellers list an item 20% over market (as an example), reality will set in and eventually they will lower there price. Sometimes they see a mint item and assume there very good condition is the same. (happens all of the time) I select who i make offers from and how long the item has been listed amongst other variables. I find great deals and sometimes make great relationships because i take the time to educate the difference in pricing. I have the time to hunt for items so many might not find this a good way to spend there own time. YMMV

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A lot depends on the items also.

If you're selling items that 100 other sellers are selling, I could see using best offer and try to beat them.

A lot of the stuff I sold, it was the only one on Ebay, so there wasn't any competition for those items.

[chevymontecarlo88]

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@kensgiftshop wrote:

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@chevymontecarlo88 wrote:

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@kensgiftshop wrote:

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.

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Everyone has there own way of buying and this is not a criticism of the way you do. I love using best offer when purchasing. Many times when sellers list an item 20% over market (as an example), reality will set in and eventually they will lower there price. Sometimes they see a mint item and assume there very good condition is the same. (happens all of the time) I select who i make offers from and how long the item has been listed amongst other variables. I find great deals and sometimes make great relationships because i take the time to educate the difference in pricing. I have the time to hunt for items so many might not find this a good way to spend there own time. YMMV

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A lot depends on the items also.

If you're selling items that 100 other sellers are selling, I could see using best offer and try to beat them.

A lot of the stuff I sold, it was the only one on Ebay, so there wasn't any competition for those items.

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Yes. I agree. I was specifically responding about Buying (OBO) which my point was that you can acquire great deals with a little finessing. Many are turned off by over inflated pricing and it offers opportunities to those who may want to make an offer. With the categories i buy in, best offer options gets me some of the best items at a great discount. Many sellers shoot for the moon and/or have no idea what reality is when pricing.

[tobaccocardyahoo]

A very few of my offers include Make An Offer, and they automatically accept or reject offers based on my belief in the value of the item. I can wait for the sale.

I am much more disturbed by the unsolicited offers which mostly fall in two types of insulting offer.

1. The not worth the time offer, which is such a small fraction of the price to warrant either no response, a blocked buyer or a single word response - no.

2. An offer for multiple items which is inadequate for even one item.

I only accept unsolicited offers from my repeat buyers, who ask for a modest discount.

[tdl_collectibles]

I wish eBay would make the Best Offer as a Business Policy so could be more easily managed.  I.e would like different auto-declines by category based on the average cost of goods or different times of the year.

As it stands now, I just do an auto-decline for any offer received that is more than 35% less than my listing price.

[dbfolks166mt]

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?

     I have 8 boxes that I can use to judge what size the packed up item will be and I simply weight the boxed item but do not keep it boxed up. I also use a LOT of recycled padded mailers. So the dims and weight I put into the listing are accurate. 

    The eBay calculated shipping is very accurate based on the buyers location and if you are NOT passing the shipping discount along to the buyer the shipping the buyer pays will cover the actual cost of the label and in most cases the FVF's on the shipping and the packing materials. I actually use Pirate Ship to purchase and print my labels which has the same, sometimes better, discounted rates as eBay plus I use the cash back credit card to pay for those labels. 

     I also know pretty much where the break even point is between using ground advantage and priority mail flat rate boxes or envelopes. This is usually on heavier items and in those instances I will offer free shipping since I know the shipping cost regardless of where the buyer lives. Following is a good example, this ships in a medium priority mail flat rate box.

[loose_goose_garage]

Received this one last night/ this morning. An offer of 20% of the listed price; not 20% off, but 80% off. You would think they would get the hint when I send back an offer for the full price (didn't even know you could do that), but I guess not.

I appreciate all the opinions and advice given, for me I think it's time to do away with it and not have to deal with these kinds of people consistently. 

[frecklesfinery88]

A lot of good comments on here. I have done both over the years. 

This year I have been inundated with severely low ball offers. So I did remove  the best offer from a big part of my listings. My opinion is that it automatically should set the or best offer at the median price sold, Not $2.  For instance; we listed a purse last week for $19.88 and an offer came in for $4!  I have found it easier to just remove the OBO unless it is old inventory that we just want to move out.  It all depends on the seller and how they want to run their store.

Have a great day!