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eBay is an auction site.
Is it that difficult to understand?
I only put things on auction three or four times a month to bring business to my store. My eBay store sells items at a fixed price (some of which have a "make an offer").
It is hard to explain without saying exactly what I sell. But imagine that there is a high quality watch brand & watch accessories (this is an example, I do not sell watches) that never goes on sale and you can only purchase at a few stand alone stores that only sell that brand ofwatch. You can't buy that brand of watch in any other store.
Now picture that I have a connection that allows me to purchase a limited amount of those watches on sale. I buy the watches & accessories strictly for resale in my eBay store (obviously I can't wear 30 watches at a time).
If you can even find these watches for sale on eBay they are normally used watches and not new. There are only a handful of fellow sellers who sell the new watches. Picture a $80 "watch" and someone makes an offer for something like $5. That is the type of thing that I was venting about.
I am going to start having eBay automatically reject offers under a certain amount so I never see them. I haven't done that in the past because I rarely had offers so low that they were laughable (and then they usually ask for free shipping as well) but it has been happening more often in the past year.
Goes both ways. There was an item selling for $21 shipped, I offered $20, it was rejected. What's the point of offering best offer if you can't even take a buck off? *shrug*
No point at all. The seller was obviously unclear on the concept.
My SOP is to set the automatic-decline at 33%. I accept anything over that.
As a seller, I use Best-Offer for everything in my store.
But there's something weird going on with B/O lately - ebay changed it so it remains for sale until the buyer actually pays for it. It does not sit in limbo any more (used to be, the item was considered 'bought and sold' if the seller accepted the offer.) Which would be OK, except ebay fails to let the buyer know his offer has been accepted! So I have items with acceptable offers expiring because the buyer does not know he won and needs to pay.
why wouldn't buyers offer insultingly low amounts for items? If an item is worth 20 dollars and I offer 5 and you accept for whatever reason, I can turn around, sell it for 10, and double my money.
To offer a low amount of money for an item doesn't take much effort. And when an offer is finally accepted all that little to no work pays off.
This is the same thing for corporations. They could pay the high wages of an american manufacturing plant, or they could have their product manufactured in china for 1/10th the price and ship it over for a total cost of 1/9th the price if it was manufactured in the US.
My question is why do sellers want insultingly high prices on "buy it now" offers?
Good question.
OBO means or best offer. I often would pay an insultingly low price for something but have no interest in paying much more than that. Say Devon watches. Hey, they're pretty cool. Totally unique. Am I going to pay $16,000 for it? Oh, gosh no. I might pay $600 though. It is an awesome watch, but at $16,000? No way.
the offer things are stupid, you never get realistic offers and once you turn someone down i think it creates bad feelings so where as you might have sold it to the person just listing a straight price because you shot down their offer they are going to move onto a diff seller.
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