Seller requesting buyer make their offers 'higher' than the 'Buy it now' price!

[2486buffyslay]

The 'Buy it now' price is US$89.89. I made an offer of US$80.90. I consider that a fair offer, but ask if the seller considers it too low to please make a 'counter offer'. That's a reasonable request. However I noticed when making my offer that as soon as I typed 80.90 a message appeared saying "The buyer will be more likely to respond to your offer if it is around US$104.90".  Obviously I'm neither stupid nor a scammer to make an offer higher than the 'Buy it now' price. I don't know any circumstance where doing so would make sense to the buyer!

My question is who is this message coming from? Is it the seller or eBay? Surely either party should know better than to 'suggest' to the buyer their offer be higher than the 'Buy it now' price! If it's the seller what can I do - report them to eBay? The implication from the message is the seller will ''ignore' any offers made by me unless they're higher, or possibly equal to, the 'Buy it now' price! My 1st offer has 'expired' i.e. NO response from the seller!

[springyzone]

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@2486buffyslay wrote:

The 'Buy it now' price is US$89.89. I made an offer of US$80.90. I consider that a fair offer, but ask if the seller considers it too low to please make a 'counter offer'. That's a reasonable request. However I noticed when making my offer that as soon as I typed 80.90 a message appeared saying "The buyer will be more likely to respond to your offer if it is around US$104.90".  Obviously I'm neither stupid nor a scammer to make an offer higher than the 'Buy it now' price. I don't know any circumstance where doing so would make sense to the buyer!

My question is who is this message coming from? Is it the seller or eBay? Surely either party should know better than to 'suggest' to the buyer their offer be higher than the 'Buy it now' price! If it's the seller what can I do - report them to eBay? The implication from the message is the seller will ''ignore' any offers made by me unless they're higher, or possibly equal to, the 'Buy it now' price! My 1st offer has 'expired' i.e. NO response from the seller!

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First up, I think you may have made a mistake. Do you mean the message was,"The seller will be more likely to respond to your offer if it is around $104.90"? I am assuming so, anyway.

I'd say that is definitely a message from ebay, a prompt. I agree with you it is a stupid one, given the buy it now price is quite a bit less.

My guess is the seller wouldn't even be aware you were given that auto prompt.

I haven't used the 'make an offer' function lately so I don't know what changes ebay has made, but in the past, I know that if a seller had their auto accept amounts etc in the system, I would sometimes get a message such as 'Your offer has not been accepted', as soon as I typed it in and sent it. I didn't mind that, I knew where I was.

Not all sellers had it on auto though so sometimes I had to wait around for a day for an answer. 

I guess you could try a slightly higher offer. You don't have to do what ebay is suggesting, but maybe you could try eg only 5% off.  After that, you would still have one more bid available.

If that fails, you have a decision to make. If you want it, you may need to pay full price.

PS If the seller hasn't got their auto settings on and they completely ignored the offer with no response, I'd be pretty annoyed, to tell the truth. It just isn't professional.

[2486buffyslay]

Sorry, yes I meant the message says "The seller will be more likely to respond to your offer if it is around US$104.90"

Yes on my 2nd offer (I believe I have 5) I''ll make it higher, maybe US$85.00. I have a bad feeling though my next offer will still expire i.e. with no response from the seller. I agree it's very unprofessional of the seller to completely ignore the buyer, especially when they have a 99.7% rating! I'm sure there are some on this forum who'll chime in and say "The seller has NO obligation to respond to any offers (even reasonable ones) or to respond at all"! but like I say it'll reflect poorly on the seller, especially if they don't want the buyer to leave 'negative feedback'! 

I might open a chat session with eBay and see how that goes?

[gutterpunkz05]

As you said,  the seller has no obligations.  Who knows they may not even have viewed the offer.

Different countries, different rules, maybe your offer is also supposed to cover international post.

[twyngwyn]

This is at the bottom of EVERYTHING I list.......and I don't even take offers, so go figure...

To improve your chances of selling, we may send you offers from buyers that you can choose to accept or decline.

Auctions will be automatically relisted up to 8 times for free and do not count towards your monthly listings balance. Auctions with a 1- or 3-day duration will be relisted with a 7-day duration.

Funds from your sales may be unavailable and show as pending for a period of time. Learn more

[repentatleisure1952]

How will a buyer leave negative feedback if there is no transaction?

[sandypebbles]

Even if such a thing were possible, would that not come under feed extortion ?

"I'll teach you a lesson for not dropping everything and responding to me!!!!

Good thing to post on a public forum

And let other sellers know what kind of buyer they would be dealing with 

[sugar249]

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@2486buffyslay wrote:

Yes on my 2nd offer (I believe I have 5) I''ll make it higher, maybe US$85.00. I have a bad feeling though my next offer will still expire i.e. with no response from the seller. 

I might open a chat session with eBay and see how that goes?

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And if your next offer expires, it expires,  you already have unjustified bad feelings about this seller,  move on, don't buy.  You will be back next week complaining that they took 2 minutes to respond to your next request.

Not sure what you are going to chat to Ebay about,  oh wow is me the seller wont respond to me.

Sorry I just did what you said someone would,  but I guess it had to be said,  

[springyzone]

I wouldn't bother with the chat session as a lot of ebay reps are pretty useless, in my opinion. You're unlikely to get much out of them or even a direct answer to a question.

The bottom line in this case is they can't force the seller to reply to your offer.

They really can't enforce anything much. They can't force buyers to pay or sellers to post. All they can do is offer buyers protection in the event things go wrong and they don't receive what they paid for. Or pull down inappropriate ads, I guess.

I am surprised a seller with a 99.7% rating is ignoring your offers. In fact, I am surprised a regualr seller with that sort of rating would not have their auto accept/decline amounts in place. To me, that seems the most logical way to do business as it eliminates the need to respond to low ball offers.

There is a grey patch somewhere in the middle, where I can understand a seller might want to be sent the offer before accepting/declining but if that is the case, I'd expect a seller to have a look & make a decision.

I know some here say a seller is under no obligation to respond but if they don't, I feel it is ultra rude because it holds a buyer up from buying elsewhere.

I'm a bit hazy on this, but is there now an option for the buyer to state how long the offer is valid for? I think there was, last time I used it. I think, from memory, I set mine at 24 hours.

If you do ultimately end up buying, just see how the transaction goes before deciding on feedback.  If all goes extremely well, you could decide on positive feedback. You can certainly mention in feedback though that you found their communication very poor or slow or non existent. Just be careful what you say, exactly, as you don't want to give any wiggle room for them to have feedback removed.

[2486buffyslay]

Thank you everyone for replying. I did contact eBay customer service, mainly to ask why I was seeing the message asking me to make my offer higher than the 'Buy it now' price and I also mentioned the seller hadn't responded. The eBay rep basically kept repeating "Do not worry. I am positive the seller will respond and accept your offer", even when I said I had a feeling they're not going to.

I did make a 2nd offer at US$85.00, so only US$4.89 off the 'Buy it now' price,  but despite what the eBay rep kept saying, I again got no response from the seller and my 2nd offer also expired! So I decided, since there was little point in making another offer, I went straight in to do 'Buy it now'. Unfortunately I was greeted with the dreaded "This item is no longer available" i.e. someone else bought it, presumably using 'Buy it now'.

It seems the seller had no intention of accepting ANY 'reasonable offers', even if only US$1.00 less than the 'Buy it now' price! In other words they were waiting for someone to use the 'Buy it now'. So why waste several days of my time with offering to take 'offers' as while waiting for a response from the seller I can't really be making an offer with another seller for the same item!

Also as I was unable to buy the item I was unable to leave feedback. Maybe eBay could change this? Afterall one can have a negative experience with a seller without buying anything from them e.g. rude replies to a buyer's inquiries.

So I had no choice but to try the seller with the next best price, which was US$101.19. So I put in my offer and within a few hours they'd responded and accepted!