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).
That's great, DG. I think it makes it much clearer than the ebay generic message.
I know people here do tend to think if the ebay message mentions it not being enabled by a seller, then buyers should know the score but I don't think they necessarily do, half the time. Seeing a note that they could send a message to make an offer is sending a mixed message that signals that as acceptable. Confuses the issue.
Your message, on the other hand, is totally clear, no room for the slightest confusion, which is how it needs to be. And very professionally worded as well. Ebay should offer you a job, you could clean up their act in no time.
@springyzone wrote:Ebay should offer you a job, you could clean up their act in no time.
(I fear CS reps are, at least, represetative of a greater problem that starts from the top-down, so not 100% sure I'd be cut out for the job, lol - PS my reply is in jest, but my thanks for the compliment is sincere 🙂 ).
Thanks for that information. I've always assumed those FAQs don't show for sellers who've never enabled them but I did wonder whether that's changed. As I've never enabled them it means my potential buyer made an offer off her own bat, though I'm not sure how "make an offer" got into the subject line of the email. That would tend to indicate that she chose that subject when she asked her question, but maybe ebay have filled in my FAQs without my knowledge. I'll have to sign in via my other ID and check it.
Sorry, signed in on one ID but ebay still has me down on the other one for the forums. (Split personality - the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing. )
@glenbankloel,
It's helpful for your business model to have the ability to enable buyers to make you an offer.
eBay allow you to set up the option so that buyers can see you're happy to talk 
In some business models, I agree that enabling best offers can be a good marketing tool and selling practice to make it clear that reasonable offers will be considered. For some fairly low-volume to medium-volume sellers, even an unreasonably low offer might well be welcomed to "get the ball rolling", so that a bit of offer/counter-offer can occur, and an agreed-upon final price (which isn't so low that the seller has no profit but is still low enough that the buyer perceives that they have a genuine bargain) could be negotiated.
For the very occasional seller trying to get rid of things around the house, the "Make Offer" facility could work well... especially where the seller has over-estimated the value of their used items! It's a good way to find current market value, or at least the highest that buyers are willing to pay.
But imagine you were selling more expensive items, with the items priced so that you would make enough of a margin to pay your eBay and PayPal fees, pay postage and packaging costs, and give you just enough to make it worthwhile selling at all. In those circumstances, lower offers would not only be unwelcome, I'd imagine, but might even strike you as an insult, particularly if your price is very reasonable compared to that of other sellers. If eBay slap on a "Make Offer" option despite your explicitly excluding that from your listing, it's wrong - on every level. And... for eBay to explicitly encourage offers where you've listed without enabling "Make Offer" (in the questions, with the default text that has been discovered in this thread"), that too is wrong - and in those cases the buyer too who makes an offer (despite reading "The seller hasn't enabled offers for this item") is being pushy and potentially offensive.❃
Or - imagine that you were quite a large-scale seller, and that you employed others to package up and prepare items for posting, and had all the associated costs of running a business with employees. The prices that your business has set would be fair, giving buyers a good deal without going so far below RRP that you would be making too little to survive. Would any business in those circumstances be happy to pay one or even two employees to reply to messages where a good proportion of the messages aren't about the items themselves, but rather are making unsolicited offers which your terms and conditions have already made clear are unwanted?
❃ Consider the fact that we in Australia do not live in a consumer society geared towards encouraging haggling, in contrast to other countries where haggling is very much part of the culture. That's not to say that haggling doesn't occur - but it's rather more specific in terms of type of item and circumstance of potential purchase.❃❃ Anyone who buys a car from a car dealer without haggling, for instance, is acting foolishly (in my opinion). But one doesn't go to a coffee shop and try to bargain down the cost of a double shot cappuccino and croissant - that would just be weird. One might see if a particular shop can do a better deal for cash rather than credit card payment, and some shops also offer price-matching, but if the shop does NOT offer price-matching, a buyer has no business trying to persuade the shop to drop their price. It's nothing like the haggling that occurs as a matter of course in some countries, where the first price or listed price is understood to be the opening salvo in what might be a protracted negotiating process! (See Travel tips: how to haggle in foreign countries, on traveller.com.au; also How to haggle; and Suemedha Sood's article on BBC, The art of haggling.)
❃❃ Some buyers do seem to think that if an item is listed on an auction website or online marketplace website, its price is open to negotiation. Clearly that is not the case, and that's why it must (in my opinion) be very clear when the seller does not welcome an offer of a lower price. It's time-wasting at the very least, and at its worst it is resource- and time-wasting as well as being annoying if buyers are able to send through an offer via the seller's contact information/messaging, because so far as I know, there's no way to set up an automatic reply to such offers saying "Price is not open to negotiation. Thank you for your interest; you are welcome to purchase at the listed price" or some such thing.❃❃❃
❃❃❃ I could see the purpose in being able to set up such a system because it would immediately separate the sheep from the goats (without wanting to appear irreligious by using the sheep/goat comparison in this context!). The genuinely interested buyer who is going to buy even if there's no discount would then know beyond question that the price is the price, and they can then go ahead and buy. The "chancer" who was only ever going to buy if the item were reduced tby some ridiculous amount, but never had the slightest interest in paying anywhere near full price, knows that there's no point in continuing to launch offers at the seller, and will go away to bother some other seller in the hopes of finding the Koh-i-Noor for $20.
