Problem with sending an offer to a buyer

[klatu_verada_nicto]

I'm trying to dsend an offer to someone who is watching my item, but the site will not let me proceed.

I get the "Amount must be at least 5% less than your Buy It Now price" warning, even though the price I have entered is much lower than 5% off.

Any thoughs or solutions to this problem?

...and yes, I have tried entering it as 1699, 1,699, 1699.00 & 1,699.00

[davewil1964]

Watchers are anonymous. I don't believe you can send anything to a watcher, offers or messages, unless they send you a message. Then you can make an offer in your reply.

[digital*ghost · Accepted solution]

This is still a fairly new feature, so I'm guessing a lot of the kinks haven't been ironed out, yet. I'm also not 100% sure if the feature has been fully or properly rolled out in Australia. It's possible that there is a minimum number of watchers required on a listing, too, as apparently the message buyers receive advise them that the offer has been made available to others (eBay using FOMO to tempt buyers even more - source: https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2018/8/1535312833.html).

I have added the item in your image to my watch list - obviously I have no actual interest in purchasing it, but if it is a watcher-count issue, maybe it'll actually help the feature to work.

This thread on eBay.com clarifies a few things about the feature, it does say that it will work with only one watcher, but it also lists a couple of other requirements:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Send-a-watcher-an-offer-Clarification/m-p/28891787/highlight/t...

Edited to add: buyers can also opt out of receiving offers, by the way, I haven't explored if I have that option in my account settings, and presumably it should show a more appropriate error message if the buyer has elected not to receive offers, but if the buyer is in a location where this feature isn't available or something (and therefore can't opt out), that might also cause some weird errors. 

[klatu_verada_nicto]

Thanks, having the extra watcher seemed to work.

[digital*ghost]

Indeed it did 🙂

Just in case you don't get to preview what the buyer receives and are curious:

[imastawka]

There's also a 10% coupon attached to that item now, bringing it down to $1709

[jane-de-cluttering]

do you know what sort of notification that the seller receives?  Becasue I thought I'd try this feature out last month & I don't know whether it worked or not.  I had no notification one way or the other.  There were three watchers & i don't know whether it went to one or all of them

[digital*ghost]

Sorry, no - I've never sent one, and the offer in the screenshot above is the only one I've ever received as a buyer. 

They might appear under "your offers", though. That's the only place I can find the offers I sent through eBay messages (the one where you can just hit "reply with offer" when a buyer sends you a message, which I've used to provide bulk quantity discounts a few times - I don't get any notifications for those, and from memory it was a little difficult to find where I can view them, but they are there somewhere, so these promo ones might be there too. Sorry if it's a bit vague). 

[jane-de-cluttering]

thanks. No I can't see anything there. And if I could that would mean I would know who the Watchers were. And perhaps Ebay doesn't want that to happen.

[digital*ghost]

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@jane-de-cluttering wrote:
And if I could that would mean I would know who the Watchers were. And perhaps Ebay doesn't want that to happen.

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Possibly, but they don't necessarily have to display IDs for these type of offers, they could also disguise them like the do in bidding histories and feedback. Though it's a bit of a moot point though, if they don't give you anywhere to check on them at all, anyway. Maybe because there's just a time limit and no accept or decline (or counter offer function) on these ones, ebay figured a seller didn't need to check on the status