eBay appear to be once again running tests with eBay Best Offer, enabling buyers to select a time period during which their offer is valid. Rather than automatically being live for two days, buyers in the test group can choose for their offer to be live for 12, 24 or 48 hours.
eBay Best Offer is an optional feature which sellers can activate. Previously it was very useful for allowing buyers to make an offer if they were buying a multiple quantity, but now that can be achieved with eBay multi-buy discounts set in advance by the seller.
This is a feature that buyers have been asking for on and off for years and it’s something that eBay have tested in the past. Buyers today are generally impatient and don’t want to wait for two days to discover if they’ve been successful or not. Certainly in some categories buyers are happy with auctions or to wait for a seller to respond to Best Offers, but in others they prefer a quicker decision and to know if they’ve won the item or not.
Sellers won’t be impacted by this change if they already have auto accept and auto decline set for eBay Best Offer. It’s only if there are products for which they manually accept or reject that they’ll know. Most sellers are pretty responsive and, especially with the eBay App, you’ll know by email and eBay alerts if you need to respond to a Best Offer and even the shortest 12 hour period should give sufficient time to respond.
If you use Best Offer we would suggest combining it with eBay Multi-buy discounts and set your accept and reject levels to the same value. This means if a buyer offers anything at or above your minimum accept price the transaction will instantly be completed and anything below your minimum selling price will automatically be rejected.
2 Responses
Meh, not awfully bothered by this as a seller, although I cannot wait for the first offer at 20% of my asking price telling me that this deal of a lifetime is only available for 12 hours ! Whatever shall I do !
Wonder when eBay will be introducing best offer on monthly bills so we can submit offers to them.
They already include best offer in all listings for buyers to choose when they contact sellers even thou best offer is not included in nearly all my listings as just frustrates buyers when you tell them no.
Often get the reply back from buyers, why don’t you states you don’t want best offers in your listings.