How Does eBay’s Make Offer Work ?
A question that I get asked time after time by new people and by those that have been selling on the eBay platform for a long time is what and how does eBay’s Make Offer work? Well before we get any further I would like to clear up a small point, it is called Best Offer, but for some reason people call it Make Offer, Make Me an offer, or Best Offer.
If you stop most people in a country where they have an internet connection and ask them a question you will get a response something like….it is an online auction, a big car boot, an e-commerce site and several other answers. Yes eBay is all that and so much more. It did start life as an auction site and then they added a buy it now function where people and businesses could sell their items at a set price. Then one day they launched “Best Offer” “Make Offer”, and this opened up a whole new playing field for sellers and buyers.
So what Is Best Offer / Make Offer ?
The best way to describe it is an auction in reverse. Instead of you bidding the item up in price, you send in a lower offer price to the seller and wait for them to respond back to you with a Yes, No, or Counter Offer. For example let us say you have your item on sale for £50.00, and have Best Offer set up, someone can send you an offer of £40.00 or any price, it is up to you to say yes, no, or you can send them a counter offer of anything between £40.00 and £50.00. Now the seller can either say yes, no, or send you another offer. This can happen twice in a 48 hour period. Once you or the buyer has said yes the deal is done and the item has sold, and you go through the same invoice process as you would normally.
You can automate the whole process, and now while this is good, it does have it down side as you set the figures and their is no human interaction. Let’s say a customer has bought 10 items and they are looking for a bit of discount, now they could put in a Best Offer at a slightly lower price and include a note saying they are looking at buying 10 items and would you except this lower price. If it was on automatic and was below the figure you set it would be an automatic decline, as the system cannot read notes.
But if you had got it set to manual, you would have read the note, and made up your mind.
Hope this has helped you with the question “What is Best Offer / Make Offer”
Andrew Milburn Is An eBay Consultant Based In The UK
