Best offer "essays"

Strapped

Why do buyers send an essay with their best offers, about how much they like/want the item? Do they think sellers actually care? I certainly don't - if your offer is enough £s, I'll sell it to you. I don't really care your reasons. :huh:

soolin

I don't like the terms and conditions that some send as well 'i'll offer you £15 for this as long as you add your item number xx as well as a freebie and upgrade to 1st class at no extra charge and post in the next ten minutes'

hmm, no-blocked

porto_bello

I've experimented with buy it now with best offer and found it tends to attract 'the idiots'.

I've had more than one long-winded expression of how brilliant the item is and how desperate they are to buy the item... followed by BUT I need to drop the price greatly because the item isn't that good and they don't really want it that much!

I find best offer only attracts multiple stupid offers - list something for £100 and you might get 3 offers for £8, £10, £12 from the same bidder, followed by messages complaining that all their offers were rejected!

I don't bother with best offer any more. I've found that after various silly offers, the item won't sell, but having relisted the item as an auction, with a starting price of the full buy it now price, it sells without any trouble!

RHemmings

soolin wrote: »

I don't like the terms and conditions that some send as well 'i'll offer you £15 for this as long as you add your item number xx as well as a freebie and upgrade to 1st class at no extra charge and post in the next ten minutes'

hmm, no-blocked

I once sent a best offer for a collection only item for a price £5 more than the BIN price on the condition that the seller (about 6 miles away from me) delivered it to me. The seller happily accepted my offer and delivered by car within an hour or so of him accepting the offer. So in at least one case, a best offer with "conditions" led to a successful purchase.

Jen_Jen1985

I was selling something on BIN or best offer for £50, had someone offer me £15 and the buyer stated it was a generous offer considering I got the item for free. Ended up accepting an offer of £45.

wantsajob

Then again my experience of browsing ebay as a buyer is that BIN prices tend to be quite high - though I admit I often look at a limited range of items on ebay. At least a best offer can be properly rejected, it's not like winning a 99p start item for 99p and the seller not selling because they think it's worth a bit more.

Crowqueen

Something is only worth what someone will pay for it.

When I was selling a set of Porridge DVDs individually, I got an offer for £12 the lot including postage. I thought I could get more so I blocked the person making the offer and let the auctions run.

That taught me two things - never block someone making an offer and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The person tried to bid, got blocked, and the DVDs ended up going for pence. He rightly told me he would have ensured I got a better price for them but had rescinded his offer.

£12 all in would have been about twice what I eventually got .

zoesmummy_2006

I had the opposite experience with best offer the other day, was looking for a cake topper for my sons birthday on monday and found one i liked, had a price and best offer. I tried 35p off the original price, rejected. So tried 25p off the price, rejected!! then tried 15p off the price for my last offer..........rejected!!!

In that instance I really didnt see the point of them having best offer on the listing as they seemed unprepared to accept any offer other than what they had listed it as!!! Really bugged me at the time, but I got one and its arrived and my son cant wait for his avengers chocolate cake

Crowqueen

zoesmummy_2006 wrote: »

I had the opposite experience with best offer the other day, was looking for a cake topper for my sons birthday on monday and found one i liked, had a price and best offer. I tried 35p off the original price, rejected. So tried 25p off the price, rejected!! then tried 15p off the price for my last offer..........rejected!!!

In that instance I really didnt see the point of them having best offer on the listing as they seemed unprepared to accept any offer other than what they had listed it as!!! Really bugged me at the time, but I got one and its arrived and my son cant wait for his avengers chocolate cake

I agree. I usually try about 10-15% of the item price (sometimes e.g. to get the item inclusive of postage), it's surprising how many people use the Best Offer insensitively - unless they think it is a facility whereby someone can list at one price and expect buyers to make a higher offer.

I can imagine that to be the case in the situation you mention, though it does perhaps depend on how much the item was. 15p is a different matter on something costing £1 than it is on something costing £10.

As a sometime user of the option, I always set it to auto-reject and auto-accept at about 20% off; I was selling low-value items which weren't necessarily going to be worth paying for an auction but weren't going to be particularly valuable. It was back in the days when shop BINs cost a matter of 3p/month to list, rather than the 40p they cost now, so I could afford to do it a lot more than I necessarily could now. I also didn't think the price justified me being heavily involved in monitoring best offers and making counter-offers.

harveybobbles

I list all my BIN's with Best Offer. I find they get more attention.