Best Offer Accepted But At What Price?

How many times have you seen this and wondered what offer was accepted?





During the course of looking at data for my other posts I noticed ebay actually keeps the sale price but it's hidden.

By using the data range you can find the actual selling price, here I look for all sales over $125,000 and the auction is not shown indicating the offer that was accepted was lower than $125,000.





After a few iterations I pin it down and we see that this collection sold for $95,000.





I think this is a useful trick if you are doing market research or trying to determine how much to offer for a stamp or collection.

thanks KRelyea!

wouldn't that only work for a case like this where there is only 1 really high priced lot that was sold with a best offer? As soon as you have more than one in the range would you still be able to nail it down? or could you still do it, but with more work?

It works for any price item but when there are more items in the range the result screen shows more items and it's a little harder to check that the target item is still there. My 1st effort was an unused $1 Trans Mississippi and there were several other stamps near it in price but the methodology wotked fine.

Why the heck can't ebay just put the selling price.

There's an even easier way. Go to http://www.watchcount.com/, enter the lot number (291802065412) in the keyword field, and click "show me what's most popular". You'll get a page with a "price may be shown here on ebay" link. That usually works to show the best offer price (it worked with the Nobelspirit lot mentioned above).

It's a very nice back door, although I hesitate even mentioning it because I'm sure ebay would quickly close the loophole if they found out (SHHHHH!!, LOL)

Why does the bid history show them not accepting much, much higher offers then they eventually accepted?
Don

I wonder if the consignor knows a $165,000 offer was rejected! If Noblespirit was communicating offers to the consignor, then maybe it was the consignor who rejected the earlier offers, only to change their mind and accept something lower later on...

Wow that would anger me if I was them, that's a big change in the consignment fee. You would think that they would have discussed the possibility of lower offers up front.

Just to totally confuse the discussion it appears the item has been relisted!

If a seller had a lot of sales via best offer, having ebay show the accepted best offer prices could be detrimental to future selling prices. For example, if people can just look and see that the seller regularly accepts 50% of the asking price, people will just start making their offers around that mark, whereas many would otherwise start off offering at much higher prices than that. That's my theory, anyway.

Wow that's crazy! In that case my entire collection is for sale @ $94,999.99 and not a penny more, LOL.

Man, back when ebay first came out, things were a lot more transparent. I don't really care for the direction it has taken on hiding a lot of things.

On the Delcampe selling site, there is a place where you can actually view the sellers policy on accepting a lower price. Not all offer this option, and many use it only on the Fixed Price Sale after an Auction listing has not sold. On the item description page, tat the right edge, there is an invitation to "Make a Lower Price" or "Make a group offer", and when you click, you get a pop-up as follows.




I have used this feature on a number of purchases and have never been declined. I've seen sellers who offer as much as a 50% discount !!

I have also seen at least one seller who uses this feature on their Delcampe listings but do not include the "Make Offer" option on the same item on ebay.

Now this is something I wish ebay would do. You could be looking at 10 items from the same seller, but on ebay you have to submit a best offer for each item separately. It would be nice if you could add all 10 items to your cart and then submit 1 offer. That way the seller could see at a glance the total value I'm interested in buying plus it would be simpler for both buyer and seller.

They may have accepted the offer and the buyer didnt pay, the whole best offer system isnt good in my opinion but I do like nowdays if someone makes an offer in the ask a question you can send them an offer for what they are asking for.