The “Reply with Offer” feature is now available on eBay UK.
Sometimes called “private offers”, this is a new function that we wrote about in April that allows sellers to respond to buyer questions with a price offer or bulk discount if they get in touch. It isn’t something the buyers can initiate and basically seeks to tackle off-eBay trade.
It doesn’t affect Best Offer. You can get a taste of what it looks like in this screengrab. (User ID and location details have been shielded, but you’d get that in a real instance.)
Chris wrote about it fully here. And as he noted, it’s a good way of dealing with buyers who are looking for a cheeky deal.
It has several advantages, although it needs development. Further improvements should include the ability for sellers to effectively bundle up and discount on sales across multiple listings if they wish.
Have you seen or used Reply with Offer yet?
13 Responses
Doesn’t seem to be a live option to us yet.
Live here. Used it yesterday, nice additional way to close.
I saw it this morning. Going to try and use it to sell a slow moving item.
tried using it as the customer had asked about ‘Highland’ postage, but theres no way to remove the “excluding P&P” message from an offer that includes P&P, so gave up.
I haven’t used it yet but it sounds like a nice feature and would like to see it include multiple item discounts.
It’s a good idea and I would definitely use it for multiple-line sales. How is it initiated? Buyer, seller, either?
think ebay should sort out all its basic issues before adding more to the site
Well I’ve found a glitch with this already. If a buyer is asking a question about an item they’ve previously purchased (IE they want to buy some more) the ‘reply with offer’ isn’t there.
Not had a lot of luck – it confused buyer by saying P&P wasn’t included, even though it was a free P&P listing, so the buyer submitted another offer through the regular offers system – this voids the offer I sent, however ebay gave no notification that this was the case (I was using the mobile app, had to log into full site to work out what was going on). Buyer ended up thinking that I was messing them around so decided to shop elsewhere.
Nice in theory, but a few issues.