Setting lower limits on offers

[jane-de-cluttering]

I have a technical question, but am also interested in people’s thoughts about the strategy in general. [I always post items for a price or Best Offer.]

First of all, if I set a lower limit beyond which I will not accept offers, and a bidder makes three ‘bids’ without reaching that limit, are they then precluded from further bidding? Someone in response to another post of mine indicated just that.

I was under the impression that it wasn’t actually construed as a bid or counter-bid and they could continue on their merry way until they reached the limit, at which time the bid would be referred to me, the seller. And this would be accepted as their first bid.

For this reason I’ve not employed this as a strategy because I thought it let the bidder know exactly what the bottom line is. And it’s never a good idea when negotiating to let the other party know what your bottom-line is.

But if the situation is as the other person described (ie bids which aren’t even referred to the seller are still accepted as being a bid), I still don’t think I’m comfortable. First of all it assumes a lot of knowledge on the part of the buyer. [Knowledge I didn’t have, so why would they?] Secondly without any sort of contact I’m losing an opportunity to negotiate & hear about their reasoning.

Thank you once again to all the people who have responded so thoughtfully to my questions in the past.

[springyzone]

I think I might be the person who mentioned it in another thread. I mentioned it somewhere I think, anyway.

I remember some time  ago, when Best offers came in, going to read how it worked but after reading your post, thought I better go in again and check if it is still the same. I think it is. Here is the link I wa looking at.

https://www.ebay.com.au/help/buying/buy-now/making-best-offer?id=4019&st=12&pos=1&query=Making%20a%2...

My interpretation of that is that

* for most items, a buyer can make 3 offers. In the car category though (and perhaps some others, I have not investigated that far) there can be up to 10 offers.

* Rejected offers, cancelled offers and expired offers all  still count as an offer. It says to use your offers wisely.

As a buyer, after reading that, I would expect that an auto rejected offer would still count as an offer & in fact it would be a heads up to me that I was not in the ball park. I presume some sellers set it up to auto accept or reject, while others may have a middle range category where they will consider the offer. Other sellers may manually consider  every offer, I suppose, though if I were selling I would personally set a lower limit for  auto reject  because as a buyer, I know that quick feedback is best. And if a seller  already knows in his mind what his lower limit is, might as well have auto reject on offers lower than that.

I assume ebay have these limits in place for a very good reason as otherwise, buyers would make  offer after offer in $1 increments to find out what the seller's lowest limit was.

[springyzone]

PS A buyer who makes 3 offers which are all rejected can still buy your item. They can pay full asking price & get it if they still want it.

I don't know about other buyers, but how the system works with me is I never bother making insultingly low offers as I figure it is the waste of one of my offers, so I always start from somewhere I think might be achievable, maybe from about 85% upwards, usually about 90% & go up from there.

[jane-de-cluttering]

Now I'm wondering.  Because with my buyer-hat, I'd recently made an offer which was declined automatically.  I can't remember the exact wording.  Just now I went checked my emails and there is no record of the offer or the rejection.  Yet the messages concerning  my next offer which was automatically accepted, are there. Which might lead me to believe that my first 'offer' is not recorded as such  

[lyndal1838 · Accepted solution]

No, all offers count towards your three offers on an item, whether they are automatically declined or not.

It has always been that way.

As springy says, once you have used your three offers and all were declined you can still buy the item at full listed cost if you want it.

[countessalmirena · Accepted solution]

@jane-de-cluttering,

Sellers can use the function in a number of ways. I know that some will use it so that they can provide a lower item cost if the buyer wants multiple items from them.

Some sellers use it incorrectly because they don't understand how it works. For instance, they may not be aware that the Make Offer button disappears on an auction if someone places a bid. Some will not realise that Make Offer doesn't mean "Here's my lowest price (Buy Now on a fixed price listing, or the starting bid on an auction-style listing) - now make me a better officer and I might accept it and let you have my item at that higher price". (I.E., they think that Make Offer is for a higher offer, not realising that it's there for the buyer to make the lowest possible offer that the seller will accept.)

And... in some cases, Make Offer appears on listings where the seller has not enabled it. The worst examples of that (where eBay imposes the Make Offer on a listing) are when eBay also set an auto-accept price. I'm not sure if eBay are still doing that, as it's been a while since any seller complained on these boards about this, but it's certainly a practice that was happening not very long ago. I would imagine many a seller to whom it happened contacted eBay with full-throttle outrage, and at least some of those must surely have subsequently followed up by contacting the ACCC. If so, eBay would have been told, very smartish indeed, that that's a no-no.

Some sellers will set an auto-decline price as high as possible (close to their buy it now price), in order to avoid eBay's imposing an auto-accept price at or just below 50% of the listed price. This is a direct result of the afore-mentioned eBay-imposing-an-automatically-accepted-offer-price behaviour.

And... some sellers will be using the Best Offer feature as was probably primarily intended.

However it is, buyers will in general get those three chances to make a bid. If you enable Make Offer on your listings, and a buyer makes three offers all of which are automatically declined, that means the buyer was trying it on, or trying to get your item at a ludicrously low price. Not a serious bidder, in other words. (Have you ever noticed, by the way, that people who get things for a bargain price seem to be more demanding and less inclined to be satisfied than someone who pays full price?)

If you enable Make Offer with your seller-hat and enable auto-decline, you'll know that a buyer who repeatedly make silly offers is not a buyer with whom you want to risk a transaction! It's a good way to weed out truffle-heads.