Seller raised Buy Now price after rejecting offers - Feeling a bit cheated

[curiotopia]

This seems fraudulent or unethical to me on the part of the seller.  Would be interested to know your thoughts. 

I put 2 offers on a Buy it Now/Best Offer item within a few short minutes.  The item was listed Buy it Now for $24.99. The initial offer of $19.95 was rejected by the seller. I made a further offer of $20.95 which was also rejected by the seller. After receiving the 2nd rejection, I attempted to make a higher offer, but was notified that I had exhausted the number of offers I could make on the item. I proceeded to purchase the item as a 'Buy it Now', but noticed that the seller had raised the Buy it Now price after I had made the 2nd offer. The Buy it Now price was now $27.49., up from $24.99. I feel this is misleading on the part of the seller by refusing reasonable offers close to the asking price, waiting for my offer limit to be exhausted, then raising the price to capture a likely sale to an eager buyer. Surely this is not an ethical way to behave as a seller?

[davewil1964]

You must have made 3 offers, as that is the limit.

A seller can reject (or ignore) any offer made. Your offers were 20% and 16% less than the BIN. Not insignificant, and not necessarily 'close'. That would depend on the margin the seller had on the item. Or whether the price included any, subsequently ended, promotion.

The upshot is that if you had bought at BIN in the first place you would have saved money. At least, you should have checked the price when you DID buy, rather than assuming.

It is not fraudulent - you bought at the price advertised at the time of purchase.

I don't consider it unethical, but I set my 'best offers' to auto-reject any that I consider unreasonable, so you would have had your offers automatically rejected and I would never have known.

In fact, if you put 2 offers in in that short a time, you may well have hit the auto-reject block.

[*tippy*toes*]

Fraudulent? Give me a break.

Did you buy the item from overseas? If you did, it would have been the flucutating exchange rates.

If the item is in Austra, then the seller has every right in the world to change the price. I do it all the time!

[lm-entertainment]

the seller is able to set the price of the item to whatever they want.

the simple fact is, you bought it at the price they set it to. if they had tried to change the price after you bought it, it wouldn't allow the seller to change the price. 

you may find it unethical, but it's no different to any retail store putting it's price up or down based on supply / demand for instance. 

next time, i'd ensure you take notice of the buy it now price before you click the commit to buy button :] 

[digital*ghost]

The seller's actions in this case in no way whatsoever constitute "fraud". I see that word thrown around a lot, usually when someone feels like something is unfair, or they missed out on something, sometimes even when they feel like they paid too much for an item in retrospect, but fraud is a serious accusation that has a pretty specific meaning (like most words), so it really should only be used when it actually applies. Raising prices on the basis of market response is also not unethical - though I guess the timing can make it feel like it is. 

Maybe it's just me, but when I used best offer on listings, I always felt the buyers who just outright BIN'ed the item at full price to be the eager ones - sending offers to get a lower price gave me the impression the buyers were less keen, but might be interested if they got a discount, particularly because BIN'ing an item prevented anyone else from buying one-off items, while sending through an offer and waiting for a response leaves it open for anyone else to buy.

Sellers use the Best Offer feature for a multitude of reasons, and they change prices for a multitude of reasons as well - it's possible they realised people were going to make offers at a fairly consistent starting point (percentage wise), and thought it would be better for the starting point to result in those offers being in the ball-park of what they'd actually accept (eg a 20% discount on $27.49 is around $22.00, which would have been in the ball park of a 10% discount on the original price, and pretty reasonable for a single item priced at $25~odd). 

[brerrabbit585]

They may have been meaning to raise the price for a while and only just remembered when you started making offers. As was said by someone else, the seller may not even know you made the offers if they had it set to auto accept or reject offers.

I really don't understand what you mean by "it's misleading on the part of the seller by refusing reasonable offers close to the asking price". They don't have to accept any offer unless THEY want to. It's not up to you to decide what's reasonable. I would have said a 20% discount isn't "close to the asking price".

[zanadoo_56]

I'm not a seller but as a buyer I learnt very quickly that sellers can change the price at any time for God knows what reasons.  This was quite a while ago.  I was watching a reference book - not rare but out of print - while I decided if I wanted to buy it or not.  The issue was the postage as it was a heavy book and it was an overseas purchase.

A few more watchers joined me and then suddenly the seller upped the BIN price.  A few days later it went up again.  The book didn't sell but the number of watchers remained.  Another couple of days and the price again rose.  Watcher numbers went down.  Another rise and I seemed to be the last one watching.  Then I deleted the book too.  I wonder if the seller went back to the old price or not.  I'll never know, because I found another seller of the same book at a good price and reasonable postage so I bought it from them.

I also last year put in a best offer on a doll and outfit....where the original price was actually pretty good.  The only problem was I wanted the outfit but not the doll...and the doll also had some display issues. The seller sent a counter offer.  I decided against taking it.  The doll sold quite quickly and for the full price, but I have no regrets.

Sometimes we leave off making a decision and regret it and sometimes it pays off.  Same for sellers I guess when they come to determining a sale price or accepting an offer (or not).  I just shrug my shoulders and move on.  You never know what be around the corner when it comes to eBay. Sure I've bought items I've later found I could have got cheaper but as long as the difference is only a few dollars I won't lose any sleep over it.

[chameleon54]

Fraud....................

Its simple really. Its the sellers item until some-one pays them what they want for it. They dont have to accept any offers and can charge you double what they would sell it to some-one else for if they feel like it.

Or they can add you to their ebay blocked buyer list and not sell it to you at all.

Personally I would follow the latter path based on the self entitled attitude you have expressed in your post.

[springyzone]

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@curiotopiawrote:

This seems fraudulent or unethical to me on the part of the seller.  Would be interested to know your thoughts. 

I put 2 offers on a Buy it Now/Best Offer item within a few short minutes.  The item was listed Buy it Now for $24.99. The initial offer of $19.95 was rejected by the seller. I made a further offer of $20.95 which was also rejected by the seller. After receiving the 2nd rejection, I attempted to make a higher offer, but was notified that I had exhausted the number of offers I could make on the item. I proceeded to purchase the item as a 'Buy it Now', but noticed that the seller had raised the Buy it Now price after I had made the 2nd offer. The Buy it Now price was now $27.49., up from $24.99. I feel this is misleading on the part of the seller by refusing reasonable offers close to the asking price, waiting for my offer limit to be exhausted, then raising the price to capture a likely sale to an eager buyer. Surely this is not an ethical way to behave as a seller?

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Hmm, it isn't fraud as the price was perfectly clear in the ad & I've every confidence you'll get the item you paid for.

Is it unethical? Not really. At the stage when they put the price up, you were not a buyer. They had no real reason to even assume you necessarily would be.  You had not bought at $24.99 so they couldn't count on you paying $27.49. Was the $24.99 price a special promotion or anything?

Just for future ref, when I make an offer, I would usually make it a bit closer to the asking price. Your first offer of $19.95 was unlikely to get accepted (in my experience of make an offer). That is fairly low. You get 3 chances to make an offer. On a price like that, I think an offer of eg $23.99 would be closer to the mark.  I find offers of maybe 5% off might be accepted but not much over that.

I was interested to see someone say that if you make offers quickly you may get an auto block on additional bids too close together but I would have thought most make an offers might be close as people would try a second bid if the first failed etc

Unless you needed the item quickly, why buy if the price went up? Hold off, you may find it will go down again eventually. Some prices fluctuate a bit. Depends how much you want ited it, I suppose.

[chameleon54]

I dont have the offer facility on my listings, but do get offers regularly through messages. I had a rare machinery part for sale awhile ago. It wasnt cheap, but it was the only one listed on ebay wordwide. I had a buyer offer a very low price, which I politely declined, stating all prices firm. He messaged again with another fairly low price and some personal advice about how I should accept it.

Off to the BBL for that buyer. A few days later he messaged back saying he really needed the part and could not find it anywhere. He had an expensive piece of machinery that was broken down and costing him a lot of money every day it was idle. He was willing to pay the full price.

I didnt reply and a few days later the item sold to an international buyer......

Moral of the story .... If you are a tight a$$ it can turn around and bite you on the bom.