I think I can see why this ended listing triggered the eBay bots.
@voodoorada, I want to assure you that I don't think you did anything wrong here, but for the record, I would like to explain what I think caused eBay to issue the warning on this ended listing.
The first offer (of $2,400 on a $2,999 listing) was made and declined on the eBay listing, about a week before the listing ended. So far so good. I think that just ending the listing a week after declining an offer would probably not have triggered the warning.
You said that you then told the potential buyer your bottom line ($2,900) by eBay message, and he then offered you $2,700, and you didn't respond.
The problem is that only the first offer was made on the eBay listing. Your counteroffer of $2,900, and then the buyer's last offer of $2,700, were made by eBay message. They aren't on the listing (there was only one declined offer), and the listing was then ended very shortly after the buyer's last offer, which you had not rejected.
eBay is looking at eBay messages and emails for evidence of potential off-eBay sales. That's how they detect if an off-eBay sale might have taken place, and how they determine what they believe the sale price was (link to the FVF policy). So making offers by eBay message and then ending the listing looks suspicious, as you acknowledged. That's what happened in this case that triggered the warning.
I can understand that you didn't like the tone, or the implied threat of being charged fees. A lot of members have complained about that. So many, in fact, that eBay staff have responded and stated that while they can understand that members don't like it, they are very serious about stopping fee-avoidance and off-eBay sales, so they don't plan to tone down the message.
As I said, I don't believe that you did or were trying to do anything wrong. And it was just a warning. Hopefully, you bringing this forward publicly will help others avoid getting charged unexpected fees in the future.
I decided to respond to this post because I appreciate it, and I agree that this is probably what happened. I did say in an earlier post that I could understand why Ebay might have thought something was up, and you hit it on the head. His second offer was through the Ebay email, not an official offer. I don't know if he was asking me to sell off Ebay or if he was just gauging what my bottom number might be, but either way I did not respond until a day or so after I ended the listing; at that time I responded through Ebay and told him I appreciated it but I just couldn't go lower than $2900 (and I didnt'really even want to sell for that price either).
IF he had offered $2900, then I would have had him send an official offer through Ebay, which I could have then accepted; instead I decided to pull the tester, which I'm not going to keep defending; it's my item, I'll pull it when I feel like I need or want to. There were no bids, NOR was there an active official offer, just the one through the Ebay email system.
The whole point of my post was when I received the email and was told I could be charged a FVF; I acknowledged earlier that they were not telling me they WOULD charge it, only that they could in the future and that surprised me.
Anyway, hopefully the discussion let people know what I did to cause the situation so they could avoid it. I know there's some that are just CONVINCED I'm doing something wrong here, but I wouldn't spotlight myself to try and hide something. I see how the timing of everything triggered the Ebay response though.
