Ebay "Watchers" Psychology

Yes, you can. My experience is with eBay USA only.

John

Where? I can manually select listings to send offers to watchers, but I see no way to automatically send offers to watchers; it has to be initiated manually.

Part of the reason is that eBay idiotically doesn't allow you to send offers to all watchers. It uses algorithms to determine which listings and which watchers it thinks are appropriate to send offers to.

But it isn't automatic unless you subscribe to and pay for third party services.

Yes, you set the offer manually, but eBay automatically sends it to all watchers and future watchers. Even if someone clicks on add to watched list, and deletes it, they will get the offer too. So, we are disagreeing on terminology here.

I've done it dozens of times without any special software.

I consider that process to be automatic, or perhaps semi-automatic.

Edited to add from the eBay selling FAQ:




John

What's weird is that I have no "Offer Settings" anywhere in Active Listings as indicated above.

I can change Best Offers on individual or bulk listings but that has nothing to do with automation. I can manually send offers to the subset of watchers that eBay has allowed, but no universal automation settings at all... anywhere.

I wonder if that FAQ wording is from older versions of the Seller Hub and it's found somewhere else now. They frequently don't update documentation when they revamp interfaces every year.

Good question - I haven't sold anything on eBay for at least 4 or 5 months, but I grabbed the text from the FAQ this morning (I think it was under Seller Help).
In my experience, I used to do this all of the time (as a seller).

John