EDIT: Volunteers, please make sure your buyer communication preference IS the default setting (check-marked) to receive notifications of price reductions. Thank you @nobody*s_perfect for pointing this out.
Given eBay's changes to seller-initiated offers (auto-pay requirements for buyers, not sure if that's still rolling out or what, also more recently the unpopular practice of sending offers to people who merely looked at listings) ... and given the fact that if the buyer is NOT made to auto-pay, they have the ole option of keeping the item hostage, invisible to everyone else while not paying for 4 days and even failing to pay at all ..... I have gone back to thinking about something I've wondered about a lot in the past, and got mixed answers about it in the past, here in the Community. Yes that was all one sentence. OKAY, I'm talking about whether or not "interested" people receive a notification if the seller merely revises the listing to lower the item's price.
Wouldn't that be great?
So let's see where that stands as of now, May 2024. I have this green frog brooch currently overpriced so that some innocent buyer won't come along and ruin everything by buying it, lol. @dhbookds is already watching it. What would be great is if I could get more watchers AND some mere-lookers, to see what happens if I just lower the item price.
So let's do it like this. The "joining up" volunteer period will extend until 3 pm. Central time, tomorrow (Thursday). Please either put the listing on 'watch' OR just click on the listing and look at it.... either once or twice (please go ahead and scroll slowly down to the bottom of the listing, to give the software a sense that you really looked). If you choose to look twice, probably a good idea to close out of eBay completely after the first look, then get back in and find the listing the second time in your 'recently viewed's, and repeat the slow-scroll.
Then come back to this thread and post a reply, saying either "watched," "looked once" or "looked twice". It would be best if we have a good sampling variety of these variables, so maybe scroll through replies to see which of those hasn't been done as many as the others, then do that one.
Ugh, I hope that made sense, lemmie know if it didn't.
THEN tomorrow at 3 PM or shortly thereafter, I will revise the item's price down. I'll make a note of how many watchers it says the listing has, as well as how many "interested buyers" the popup window says the offer would go to IF I were doing it that way. I will then immediately post here that I did the revision.
Then the rest of the day/night, as each of you realizes you did or didn't get a notification, please come back and post that observation, and we'll tally up the numbers.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/126482944261
I think I can save you some trouble. Notification preferences for Buyers includes an option for being notified if the price on a watched item is reduced. I have opted out of this, I usually have at least a dozen items on my Watch list, and have never been notified about a price change.
https://commspreferences.ebay.com/commsprefs
I have this posting ID account opted out of all of those emails. But I still get notifications on the notification bell of Seller Initiated Offers (SIO) on items I've merely viewed while helping posters on this forum. Get eBay messages, too. There's your answer and saves you the trouble of running a test.
Editing my reply to show you proof, since people often want proof. I viewed this listing a couple times when helping on this thread. I did not watch the item. I did not add the item to my cart. I did view the listing multiple times.
In my eBay messages is this offer:
