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I was wondering how folks on the board here deal with eBay listings that have a Make An Offer option and how you might proceed if you got a counter offer.
Do you haggle back and forth quite a bit (up to 5 times) or give up right away as I often do?
Generally, I tend to, nine times out of ten, decline counter offers because I usually try make an informed, fair, and final offer the first time. Unless the counter offers are reasonable to me (like $5-$10),
I just decline and move onto the next seller.
For me, I try to take my time looking up the best prices on whatever I'm looking for. I gauge what the other listings are at or maybe research daily or weekly how similar items sold during the course of a week and I'll try to offer a price that's somewhere in the middle.
Sometimes it's as if some sellers look to take advantage of an impulsive buyer due to the disparity of costs for the same goods. Someone, that say, as a buyer latched on the first thing they saw and paid more because they foolishly didn't bother to scroll down and recognize a B.I.N. for much less. Maybe eBay has been like that since the beginning and in my naïveté I'm just learning. I realize no seller is obligated to sale and there's a difference of interpretation between how we define best offer. Sometimes I wonder if some sellers actually want to sell because they are asking too much.
I don't want to specify the item on my mind as I don't want to encourage more folks looking for it.
Let's just say the item is almost 20 years old. They were SRP at maybe $30 then and now range from $30 to $300 depending on condition, open, loose, broken, missing pieces, new, or whatever.
I've seen auctions for the $45 shipped up to $120 for the past few weeks. Some listings at the plus $200 range had a Make An Offer option so I reached out and made an offer for how I've perceived the item to be selling and offered much less. I even had a seller decline my offer and cite my offer was "way too low", and then counter offered a price point well beyond a Buy It Now listing another seller posted.
Do you haggle back and forth quite a bit (up to 5 times) or give up right away as I often do?
Generally, I tend to, nine times out of ten, decline counter offers because I usually try make an informed, fair, and final offer the first time. Unless the counter offers are reasonable to me (like $5-$10),
I just decline and move onto the next seller.For me, I try to take my time looking up the best prices on whatever I'm looking for. I gauge what the other listings are at or maybe research daily or weekly how similar items sold during the course of a week and I'll try to offer a price that's somewhere in the middle.
Sometimes it's as if some sellers look to take advantage of an impulsive buyer due to the disparity of costs for the same goods. Someone, that say, as a buyer latched on the first thing they saw and paid more because they foolishly didn't bother to scroll down and recognize a B.I.N. for much less. Maybe eBay has been like that since the beginning and in my naïveté I'm just learning. I realize no seller is obligated to sale and there's a difference of interpretation between how we define best offer. Sometimes I wonder if some sellers actually want to sell because they are asking too much.
I don't want to specify the item on my mind as I don't want to encourage more folks looking for it.
Let's just say the item is almost 20 years old. They were SRP at maybe $30 then and now range from $30 to $300 depending on condition, open, loose, broken, missing pieces, new, or whatever.
I've seen auctions for the $45 shipped up to $120 for the past few weeks. Some listings at the plus $200 range had a Make An Offer option so I reached out and made an offer for how I've perceived the item to be selling and offered much less. I even had a seller decline my offer and cite my offer was "way too low", and then counter offered a price point well beyond a Buy It Now listing another seller posted.
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