Has this been around for a while and I just haven't seen it because I haven't wanted to ask sellers a question? I'm talking about the topic that relates specifically to make an offer.
Maybe this is why I had a few offers last year. I still think it's rude to ask if the seller hasn't invited it and people who ask will still get put on my blocked list.
I only found this because today I got an email with the subject "Make an offer: XXX (buyer ID) sent a message about XXX (item title)" and decided to have a bit of a look around. The above example is from someone else's listing.
There's nothing on my listing that shows anything about offers so it was an unsolicited offer that was encouraged by ebay - but still not encouraged by me! I think it's time to say "NO OFFERS!" in all my listings. I don't want to block them from asking any questions at all because I actually find that gets me a few extra sales (on ebay).
Been there for at least 6 months.
Some of my listings I am happy to have offers even if I forget to tick Best Offer, afterall I can just send a brief message.
Dear buyer,
Sorry but I have listed this item as my lowest price and not accepting offers on it.
Thanks for your enquiry, regards
@brerrabbit585 wrote:
I still don't think it's ebay's place to encourage people to "have a try anyway". I've had plenty of offers in the past (before this appeared) and it's one thing for people to do it off their own bat but another for ebay to encourage it. I've got better things to do than reply to messages I'm not interested in.
Agreed. I was looking up something else the other day and saw that it is no longer against policy for buyers to send offers on items if the seller does not have best offer enabled, but didn't know this was in place. This is the kind of thing that would make someone consider disabling questions from buyers unless they have already bought, which I also discovered is now possible.
I'd like to be able to say the seller should be in control over whether or not that appears in the subject list, depending on whether they are actually open to negotiation on price, but A) there is already a function to communicate that to buyers (the actual best offer function), and B) eBay doesn't even give sellers control over that.
It's utter insanity to me, in the sense that being able to competently manage buyer's expectations should be made a priority, and as simple as possible, but eBay has an infuriating penchant for giving buyers completely different expectations, ones that are in direct contrast to what the seller intends, which is a perfect way to create more and more bad buying / selling experiences on eBay, and ultimately turning people away from the site. How bad would it be for "this seller does not accept offers" to appear somewhere around the same place the return policy is stated? You don't go into Coles, or Target, take an item up to a store clerk or cashier, and start trying to lower their prices just because (I know some of these stores have price-match policies, or might knock a few bucks off something if it's clearly damaged or whatever, but I'm talking about straight haggling for no reason). For eBay to suggest that offers can be made regardless, undermines me as the business owner, IMHO (they do it in plenty of other ways too, of course 
).
Putting pressure on sellers at every turn to lower prices - if it ever worked in a broad sense - would eventually mean there is no room to negotiate, anyway. I am certainly not here to haggle on my prices, with eBay or anyone else.
@brerrabbit585 wrote:It's not like people HAVE to make an offer just because ebay says to try it anyway, so it comes back to people's attitude.
I agree with this to a degree, but anything eBay condones as being ok has the potential to affect those attitudes. Many people consider ebay to be the higher authority, so will defer to them over anything the seller says. You can see a more stark version of this in the way people sometimes talk about payment timeframes (eg "I have 8 days to pay, I don't care what the seller says" when the seller may have said something like "payment due within 24 hours").
If eBay makes it a practical impossibility to disable offers in an official capacity, then offers have the potential to become something buyers are "entitled" to (attitude-wise - and I'm definitely not suggesting this would be the case with the majority of buyers, but every little creep of entitlement just kinda sets me off 
).
Looks like I should enable my FAQs and write my own "offers not entertained" line there.
