Using "Reply with Offer" aka Private Offer effectively

[jmb344]

Hi sellers,

The private offer feature, aka Private Offer, has been live on the site for a few years. This is the feature that allows you to respond to buyers' messages with the "Reply with Offer" button. It is NOT Best Offer. It shows up in the member-to-member conversations. As far as I can tell there is no effective way to track the offers you send on an account basis. You must go into every listing individually to see the offers you've sent and the offers accepted (http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ManageBestOffers&itemid=(item id). 

Have any of you found a way to use this tool effectively to send and track the completion of orders made through this feature? Thank you in advance for all of your feedback!

Josh

[d-k_treasures]

---

@jmb344 wrote:
fern*wood, you never really know what a buyer might want. At least this way you can include whatever else the buyer might want/need to complement their purchase. If you sell DVD's, but have a digital copy version available, say it's only $5 more. You save on shipping by including more items in an order. So offer whatever else you think they might want. Even if it's not listed on eBay yet, you can still sell it without needing to create a listing for it.

---

#1 - why would a buyer agree to pay more without photos or what is detailed in the listing? Do you really think ebay CS coud possibly understand that they have to look at the messages to figure out what the buyer got if they file a return or SNAD? And if the seller doesn't get all of it back on a return, is there any mechanism in place to appeal this?

#2 - what would be the 'sold' price on the listing? The offer price if it was bought? That would skew any numbers that sellers use. It would be as bad - or worse - than the sold price showing the listed price and not the BO price. And again, a question that will never be answered - what price is sold to 3rd party sites? My bet is the original price, which would be a flat out fake information.

#3 - Poor example in this - you can't sell digital copies unless it came with the dvd - and needs to be sold with it.

[rolenboy01]

I've had people ask for a lower price and I've sent the offer via message and many times I do not get a response I'm unsure of the reasons if the buyer just changed their mind, found it cheaper or if it's a technical issue such as the message not going through, the buyer not being able to find the offer for whatever reason or if they missed the message and too much time passed so they just deleted it.