eBay are to roll out the ability for buyers to decide how long any eBay Best Offer that they submit will be valid for. This is to be tested with a small group of buyers on eBay.com in the US before being fully launched. There is no announcement yet as to whether this will come to the UK and other eBay sites around the world so it will be one to watch for in the second eBay Seller Release of 2019, scheduled for this coming April.
The rationale is that buyers get fed up hanging around waiting for a response to a Best Offer. The new functionality will give them the ability to make an offer with an expiry date of 12, 24, or 48 hours. If they’re not in a hurry then the 48 hour norm can apply, but if they want a quicker decision so that they can make a purchase elsewhere they can demand a response within a day or even just 12 hours.
Of course there is no mandate to force sellers to respond within 12 hours but if they don’t the offer will expire and the buyer will be freed of their obligation to purchase and be able to look for an alternative offer. What buyers don’t like is making an offer and before obligated to purchase the item if they seller waits 48 hours to respond.
Automating eBay Best Offer
From the seller perspective, in most circumstances why this should impact you at all. If you’re using the eBay Best Offer features to their best effect you’ll already be automating the entire process. When you set up an eBay Best Offer on you listing you get the option to use Auto-Accept an Auto-Decline levels. If you set these to the same monetary value then any offers equal to or above your limit will be accepted and any below your minimum acceptable price will be declined.
Using automation, there’s absolutely no need to ever manually respond to an offer unless there’s a range of prices where you want to personally make a decision on accepting offers. This may be the case on listings where buyers sometimes purchase a single unit but at times make multiple quantity purchases and submit a reduced price based on the number of units they wish to purchase. In this case, it would make sense to use eBay’s relatively new multi-buy feature.
Setting aside the exceptional circumstances where you want to manually make a decision, if you set your Auto-Accept an Auto-Decline levels for eBay Best Offer renders eBay’s new buyer determined Best Offer expiration irrelevant as buyers will get an instant response either with the offer accepted and purchase completed or the offer declined so that they can move on or submit another offer. However, for the sellers who don’t use automation it does give buyers the option to shorten the offer expiration time and that in most circumstances is a good thing.
3 Responses
Wow, something i agree with! The 48hr thing is way to long, as if looking at several sellers it ties your hands, esp if some others are auctions.
This is long overdue.
Why do buyers worry about whether there’s 12,24 or 48 hrs to respond to the offer? It’s not like they feel obliged to pay if the offer is accepted…
What happened to ‘one size does not fit all’?
Fine for generic mundane consumables.
Sad day for high value collectibles, antiques and all grey markets that involve countless dynamic or situational complexities too numerous to list here in detail. Tremendous unsustainble loss if adopted sote wide.