Suggested offer more than buy it now - seriously?

[repentatleisure1952]

Is this a problem?

Looks like a suggestion to me... will not affect my life.

[springyzone]

Yes, very clumsy.

I don't know why they bother interfering with their suggestions when they are as bad as that.

The layout of some ebay sites and way they work could definitely be improved.

[countessalmirena]

OP, if you mean that someone has made an offer higher than your BUY NOW price, it’s probably the opening move in a known scam.

If you mean eBay has suggested this, then I’ll just echo what repentatleisure and springyzone have said.

[springyzone]

It was an ebay pop up suggestion, countess. It said something along the lines of 'You may need to increase your offer to such and such an amount before the seller will accept this.'

I feel that sort of message (where the suggested offer is quite a bit above the buy it now price), is likely to confuse new buyers. Make an offer has traditionally meant it could sell for a lower price but after a message such as this, a buyer might be confused and think it means it is an auction type format or a highest offer accepted. That doesn't make sense, I know, with a buy it now item. But what else could a new buyer think? They assume ebay knows what it is doing.

I am like you and as a seller, I would tend to reject offers higher than the buy it now price as I would suspect a scam.

I think ebay should leave it to the buyer to make whatever offer they like. If they want to put in a pop up, then maybe one with details about how they can only make 3 offers so not to make them too low would be a better one.

[countessalmirena]

That is bizarre.

Unless the buyer is making an offer well below the Buy Now price, I can't see any point in a pop-up appearing to prompt a higher offer. Having it appear with a suggested offer that is higher than the Buy Now price makes no sense whatsoever.

[kopenhagen5]

eBay has implemented a function which shows the average or a range of prices a same item has sold for.

Then  as suggested, if a buyer sends a low offer or is not accepted, an auto response suggests another price based on that function showing previous sold prices.

And the system probably doesn't marry up with current listing price.

That's my guess.

[springyzone]

OP had a screenshot of the whole thing and from memory, the suggested price was about $10 more than the buy it now price. This was on a medium range 2 digit figure.

It seems that ebay is making some tweaks here and there to the site, but not all of them are improvements.

Maybe ebay would be better off making it compulsory for all sellers of buy it now items to insert a price where offers would be automatically rejected. 

[countessalmirena]

improbay  verb

to twiddle with something, interfere on the spur of the moment, make useless (freq. uncalled-for) adjustments to something to its detrimental performance.

Example sentence: eBay's IT department is notorious for improbaying instead of fixing genuine technical issues on its site.