Automatic rejection of Best Offer

[KarinK]

Hi All,

My first posting here (I promise to get an avatar soon) but I have been reading my way through all the great postings for some time.

To try to figure out what length of pearls I want and what colours would suit me I decided to buy some strings of pearls from PearlLunar at eBay to have something to play with. I have read about how far you can expect to go with Best Offer and was trying my luck. An interesting thing happened.

The moment my offer was sent it got rejected. The only way this could work is if some kind of "robot" has been set up with a lower limit for when to accept an offer. Since you can only make three offers total for one item there are a limited number of attemps with which to try to guess the lower limit. But it might be worth starting with bids lower than what you are willing to pay and leave that bid for last.

Unfortunately what I wanted to pay for the strings was not acceptable so still no pearls to play with But at least I haven't spent anything yet so I can still indulge myself spending hours looking

- Karin

 

[KatiePearl]

Hi Karin!

I'm new too That is kinda funny that you mention the auto-reject b/c it happened to my dad a few weeks ago when I was visiting. He isn't very good at eBay and got that same message after submitting a best offer. He didn't try again, so I don't know what that seller would have accepted.

I hadn't seen that before, but I guess buyers can set a minimum offer accepted. I haven't sold anything on there in a really long time, but I know they are always updating their seller functions.

That's a good plan to offer low and work your way up to the "acceptable" price. I'll have to remember that- I didn't know you were limited to 3 attempts! Thanks for the tip.

Katie

 

[Pearl Dreams]

Yes, sellers can set their auction up so that lowball offers (as defined by the seller) are automatically rejected. They can also set up to automatically accept offers.
Here is the link to the eBay Help page about this:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/best-offer.html#automatically

I think in general if you offer less than 90% of the asking price your offer has a greater risk of rejection. In other words, a 10% discount is common.

By the way, welcome to P-G!

 

[Pearlcat]

With Pearllunar, in general I have found that they will accept 20% less than list price.

 

[dkan 168]

Sometimes they may come back with a counter-offer that is acceptable to them. I had that at least a couple of times from pearllunar.

And to be honest, their pearls are pretty good value for money even at full list price IMHO.

DK

 

[Bodecia]

You will find that if an item has a "Best Offer" attached to it the seller is likely to accept up to 20% off. If it is on special at the time that might not be the case. But sellers can automatically set what price will be looked at or rejected.

Sellers rarely like to be insulted such as a bidder offering 20% or up to 50% of the asking price. If not totally insulted a seller is likely to make a counter-offer.

One thing a potential buyer can do is to email the seller and ask what price they would consider. I think most sellers would then negotiate with a buyer as to what price would be acceptable. You can always try an offer of 30% off and might get lucky depending on what kind of a mark up the seller has on an item or how desperate they are at any given time.

Dawn
eBay Seller ID dawncee333