Offers on items I’ve viewed

sham63

I’ve started getting personal offers on items I’ve simply viewed - not items in my watch list.
Is this a new thing? I’m used to getting offers on items I’m actually watching but not this. 

GadgetGuru

Yeh Ive had  a few as well..... as well as sent a few even when the item has 0 watchers......

sham63

Interesting. Have any of those offers been accepted? 

soolin

sham63 said:

Interesting. Have any of those offers been accepted? 

It’s difficult to tell if an accepted offer is a result of a watcher or merely a looker, but I am finding the percentage of offers being accepted Is getting larger. 

PocketWatchMan

GadgetGuru said:

Yeh Ive had  a few as well..... as well as sent a few even when the item has 0 watchers......

There does appear to be some kind of facility to 'hide' your watching status, as I have noticed when selling a few bits. it appears as though there are zero watchers but the option to 'send an offer' regularly appears, when there are zero official watchers.

I'm interested to know generally if sellers think that sending an offer is a good idea?, nowadays?

I have been on & off ebay for a long time, probably started in the late 1990's.  I know the facility to Send an offer has not been there since the beginning, only been available for a few years or so, but I have never, ever, found it useful... all the times I have used it previously as a seller, I don't think I ever got a single sensible response. one item I recall had 19 watchers, no responses.  and I don't think it was a price issue at all, all of the above items I am referring to did sell at a satisfactory price point within a reasonable period of time, sometimes after something very straightforward like nothing more than I changed the format (from buy it now, to auction, for example).

sham63

Well my current “offer” is pointless - it’s for an item I viewed because I have the same thing for sale and just had a quick look at their listing.

My identical item is listed at £125, theirs at £175 and the offer they sent me…..£155. It then sits at the top of my watch list for 48 hours. There is no facility to ‘decline’ so I have to let it time-out.

RedImp_2

As my other half is browsing lots of things on my (our) account, I’m now fed up of receiving so many ‘offers’, as the notification goes off I get excited thinking I’ve got a bid on many stuff but no 

soolin

I regularly send offers out and find a fair percentage gets a sale. I’m sure that quite a few of the offers I send go to people , like mentioned above, that only viewed a listing to compare prices for one they have to sell. 

i_love_it

I send offers, I turn off counter offers,  my experience is that although they are rarely accepted, I get a sale at the full price very soon afterwards. I can only assume sending offers raises the profile of the listing because it happens so often.