Has Anyone Seen "Best Offer" On Ebay Auctions?

I saw it when I was relisting an item using ebay "relist". About once a month someone will ask me if I have a Buy It Now price for an auction item. I usually just say no but it would be helpful if there was an easy way to do this, but as you say I can't add best offer after there are bids.

So far, all my "Best Offer" have been lower than initial bid... I don't think buyers get this either. I've had to tell several people that the any "best offers" lower than starting bids are not going to be accepted, and the intention is you're offering a real offer on an item that will go for much higher. It's done nothing but result in wasted time for me responding to them... So for now, it's been useless, unless buyers start to understand it's not to offer less than the starting bid, its a means to buy it without having to compete in a bidding process, before bids are made.

I never accepted a "best offer" they come in too low and I get the feeling that most of them come from active E-BAY sellers who think or know they can list it at a higher price .

What is there ? about a few thousand e-bay sellers looking for inventory and making a few dollars off of a resell is all they need .

For the longest time, I only recall seeing the "Best Offer" option included on fixed price "Buy-it-Now" listings, and I took that to mean that some sellers were willing to accept a lower - but presumably realistic/reasonable - offer, and would on occasion use the feature.

For those listings wich were only slightly above what I thought reasonable, I found I could be successful with a bid that might be 70% - 90% of the listed Buy-it-Now" price.

If I felt the original listing was way out of line, I might include some explanation or analysis as to why I was only offering say 50% of the listing price, and occasionally even that worked.

What I am seeing now, is the "Best Offer" included on auction listings. I was confused at first, but quickly came to the conclusion these were being used as a mechanism to facilitate a quick sale at a level where the seller would be satisfied with the sale price. And I will act accordingly if I really want something. I have not presumed this to mean the seller was seeking a lower offer than his auction start.

There is a third combination that I see occasionally which includes an auction listing with a starting price, AND a "Buy-it-Now" figure, which effectively limits the selling price to a range between the two values. I was informed by one seller with this listing that ebay requires the "Buy-it-Now" price to be 30% above the original auction start, price but I do not know if that is factual.

All of these listing options make sense to me, and I am glad they are there. I will occasionally even contact a seller with a fixed price listing and no options to ask if he would accept a lower price, and provide an idea of what I might pay.

It's "American" to haggle. Just be polite and don't be insulting with your offer or discussion.

ebay does require a BIN on an auction listing to be at least 30% higher than the start. I don't use this feature, particularly since there is an extra charge for including a BIN.

I find that I receive offers (via message) on items, even though I rarely use the formal best offer mechanism (except where a consignor asks me to do so). Sometimes the offers are OK; frequently they are lowball and I simply ignore them.

ebay settings:

Allow Best Offer - yes/no
Automatically reject Best Offer - yes/no, amount specified/percentage
Automatically accept Best Offer - yes/no, amount specified/percentage

When ebay started applying Best Offer to auctions, they created a new problem. While no one would be likely to offer more than the asking price for a fixed price item, offering more than the start bid creates a poor man's By It Now feature. If the seller sets an automatic acceptance price above the starting bid, any offer above the asking price would be accepted. No extra fee. On the other hand, sellers not anticipating Best Offer applied to auctions face potential chaos.

The bottom line is that ebay will limit Best Offer to prices at or below the starting bid or eliminate Buy It Now as a paid "enhancement" to auction listings. I set up a test to see if the settings could be entered and I found that they could.

Is ebay winging it with random changes to their website or do they have a plan with carefully engineered definitions of web site behavior? Alternatively, could a language barrier between ebay managers and software implementers in remote parts of the world have caused this?

I think ebay believe their intentions are good, and that when Best Offer is on an auction item, it is looking for a genuine reasonable value. We aren't buying a bunch on ebay at the moment, but I know there were times in the past where I would think "I wish I could offer some amount, and just be done with it, rather than getting snipped out by 5 cents at the last second. (I wish ebay would do away with "cent" increments on items that have start values at least over $10 anyway... but they don't). The problem is ebay buyers are already conditioned that "best offer" means "lower than what the current price is". I put up an item with a start value of $50, knowing that it would go for a lot more, and I got 3 offers in about 30 minutes that were less than $45. I replied to all of them saying essentially that I'm not an idiot, and that this feature in auction is intended for reasonable price offers, not "low ball offers" just to sell something, which they actually understood (I phrased it more eloquently in my responses to them). So I think mostly this is an "education". It will take time for it to correct, and the buying community to get used to this feature. In the mean time I've just taken advantage of the feature that cfrphoto points out, in that I automatically reject offers below a reasonable amount I would take for the item, and then I don't need to respond to such trivialities.

I think the major disconnect I'm seeing though, is in those using a 3rd party tool to manage listings, rather than using the ebay on-line tools. Here I think is where ebay expects they don't need to "educate" sellers because the forms are reasonably clear, and a new feature is identifiable. In the 3rd party tools though, they are not, and defaults in the updates that ebay make are not reflected in 3rd party systems until they are updated.
I completely get why people use 3rd party systems. But, I can see there is also a point to be made for using their online tools, because updates are more easily recognized.

I don't agree with this. The feature is for Best Offer. The best offer would simply be the most the buyer would be willing to pay. The seller isn't involved in what that the price is theoretically. The buyer gets 3? chances. Obviously if the buyer ignores guidance from the seller, they will not close a deal, but this is the foundation.

The days of offending people through offers needs to go. This is not emotional, and purely business. Everyone has a price.

Auctions with Best Offer (but not Buy It Now) are a bit of a conundrum. As people above have mentioned, it can be used to make offers below the auction starting bid if you feel the starting bid is too high, or it can be used to make offers above the minimum bid, basically hoping to put the seller in a "bird in the hand" situation... do I take this offer or do I let the auction run to its conclusion? If the auction garners activity, I'll be glad I didn't accept the offer, but if it receives little activity, I'll wish I'd accepted the offer.

I very rarely run auction listings, so as a seller it's a moot point. As a buyer, however, within the last month I've purchased several items in this format where I made best offers... some above the minimum auction bid, and some below.

Not all sellers are using this the same way, nor are buyers.

It's an interesting addition to the ebay stable of options, but it really does muddy the waters.

I disagree. Third-party tools are better in almost every way. The simple answer is that ebay should have communicated about changes before springing them suddenly on unsuspecting users. It is not always possible to keep listings and templates in sync if updates are applied sometimes in the original database and sometimes to running listings on ebay. While SixBit and other third-party tools may attempt to import updates from on-line listings, it is not always possible to figure out how to map updates to on-line listings back to original listings saved off-line. Sellers use third-party listing tools to preserve their work and their sales data and benefit from more efficient fulfillment options.

I have nearly 17,000 sales in my Sixbit database and that data is very useful to me. I wouldn't do ebay without my Sixbits.

Ken