What is your feeling about adding best offer?

[musicyouneed]

I sell low cost CD's with shipping extra.  I am trying to drum up some more sales so looking at different methods of obtaining them.  I had a few sales running from 10% to 25% and had a few sales.  But have sold just as many without a sale. 

I am now considering best offer again and wanted to know what everyone's take was on it.  I have used BO a couple of years ago and everyone wanted a deal on the CD plus free shipping and then were mad when I said no.  I also got a couple of awful emails regarding a couple of BO, so I discontinued it.

My sales this year are in the toilet because:

* I had to refund 1 item that I couldn't find and couldn't buy a replacement. (defect)

* I had 2 Not As Described (1 case was broken in shipping and the other was a faulty CD)

* I went on holiday for a month. 

The above items I am sure affected best match and my sales and it is hard to get back to regular sales every day.   

[mcrlmn]

Best offer?

If you have lots of time on your hands, no friends, and want to trifle all day with the majority being bottom feeders, then 'Best Offer' is for you.

I list only "Buy it now', and am still spammed a 1/2 dozen messages a week by those making offers.
If I wanted offers I'd have a big offer button in every listing.
But I have to be polite. I now have a prepared response to copy/paste.

Good luck

[femmefan1946]

I don't like to look as if I don't know what I'm doing. And I don't like being gaslighted about what the price should be.

I worked retail for too many years for that.

So Best Offer is not something I like.

On the other hand, I like Free Shipping, wherever possible.

On most of my items I have Free Shipping to Canada and to the USA.

Of course most of my items can ship Letter Post.

How does that work for CDs?

I should menton that Free Shipping means the cost of shipping is included the the asking price for those items and that on high value items the shipping cost includes insurance (Hugh Woods International or Cookie Jar) tracking and air mail.

I wasn't born on that turnip truck.

[silverpinups]

I like the "best offer" option and have used it effectively over the years, but your selling low cost cd's so you'd be better off discounting your items with the occasional sale.

Slow sales seem to be a reality these days with the talk of trade wars across the globe and the stock markets in turmoil. People are just holding on to their money..... 

[momcqueen]

If your prices are low and your margins are lower, adding Best Offer will only make you suffer. I use it to cover cases where an American is making an offer on an item that includes free domestic postage, and that is about it. 

Lately, my Offers have all been too low to consider and more often than not accompanied by a snarky message such as 'I can buy this somewhere else for $5 and your postage is too high'. Well,  no, you cannot find it anywhere else and the postage cost you see to your location is subsidized already so take it or leave it. I've straight Declined those, breaking my own Counter-only rule.

Anyway, my point is that Best Offer only works if you actually have room to move on price and by move I don't mean drop it a buck. That's what markdowns and promotions manager BOGO events are for. 

[ricarmic]

I believe there is a place for best offer.

Generally I do not offer BO on anything "small" (to me that is anything less than a couple hundred dollars or so) because why spend time messaging back and forth about a 2 or 3 dollar difference on something selling for $14 to start with....

There is a place (in my mind) for haggling room on larger stuff, which is normally where I have it.

I've mentioned in other threads that I had a great customer a few years ago that would ONLY buy something if he could haggle on the price. It got to be so consistent that I was listing stuff I figured he'd be buying a bit higher so the after haggle price was the expected price anyway... sadly I don't know where he went (he was buying the 100s of dollars sized stuff).

So the short version is I wouldn't be putting BO on individual CD lots unless they were rare and expensive ones....

[renata6]

I use best offer on items I'm about to discontinue from Ebay. I give it another 3 months with BO, then another 3 months with a big mark-down, then it's gone. I set BO up to automatically reject low offers and never waste time haggling, just take what's offered and be happy.

[musicyouneed]

Thanks for sharing all your experiences.  I don't think best offer is right for the kind of things that I sell.  The amount of time for saving a $1 or $2 is a waste of time.

[lukey9]

I use it on all my listings, if you set the high and low you want I don't get any offers lower because if it is below your set price it automatic rejects the offer.

With the little I list right now it does not make much difference as I have no sales any way

[femmefan1946]

ONLY buy something if he could haggle on the price. It got to be so consistent that I was listing stuff I figured he'd be buying a bit higher so the after haggle price was the expected price anyway...

Aaah-- the Sears discount!

Price it high, planning to sell it later 'on sale'.

It was a consistent strategy of the late unlamented Sears Canada. And they were prosecuted for it several times in the days of PM Turner when Canada had a working Consumer Protection Bureau.

(Meant more as a history lesson than any criticism, ric. Still friends?)

[marnotom!]

If you didn't like how Best Offer worked for you in the past, why would you consider it now? The general mentality of CD buyers hasn't changed drastically.

[recped]

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@musicyouneed wrote:

I sell low cost CD's with shipping extra.  I am trying to drum up some more sales so looking at different methods of obtaining them.  I had a few sales running from 10% to 25% and had a few sales.  But have sold just as many without a sale. 

I am now considering best offer again and wanted to know what everyone's take was on it.  I have used BO a couple of years ago and everyone wanted a deal on the CD plus free shipping and then were mad when I said no.  I also got a couple of awful emails regarding a couple of BO, so I discontinued it.

My sales this year are in the toilet because:

* I had to refund 1 item that I couldn't find and couldn't buy a replacement. (defect)

* I had 2 Not As Described (1 case was broken in shipping and the other was a faulty CD)

* I went on holiday for a month. 

The above items I am sure affected best match and my sales and it is hard to get back to regular sales every day.   

---

Your sales are not in the toilet because of anything you indicate above!

Your problem is that the bulk of your cd's are common items where price rules above anything else and you don't have the lowest prices.

When I'm researching cd's that I'm thinking of listing (common / low value titles)  if I find more than a handful currently listed I don't bother wasting my time with them. Unless I was prepared going in to just get $3 - $4 (not worth my time and effort) I don't list them.

I checked a couple of your listings at random, in each case there were 100 or more currently listed, all cheap and most of them cheap AND Free Shipping AND available from domestic (to the buyer) sellers who can deliver in just a couple of days.

In a category like music cd's Best Match is almost irrelevant, buyers search by Artist / Title and then sort by lowest price. Even if they stick with Best Match they are mostly going to see listings that are the lowest price or have a high level of previous sales, your seller performance metrics have little if any impact.

Best Offer isn't going to help much if at all and is just going to get you a bunch of low ball offers that will annoy you and buyers who will quibble over things like torn shrink wrap or minor case scratches.

If you are willing to move this type of thing at any cost just list them at extremely low prices, you might at least get rid of some of them.

I have many similar items already in my system that I list when I get a free listing offer, most of them take 50 - 100 30 day cycles to sell, some I have been listing this way for YEARS. I only keep trying because a) it costs nothing and b) they are in my system and I can select and list hundreds with just a couple of clicks.

[nostalgicaftertaste]

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@mcrlmn wrote:
If you have lots of time on your hands, no friends, and want to trifle all day with the majority being bottom feeders, then 'Best Offer' is for you.

---

Everyone has a different experience, I suppose...

If bottom feeders are a concern, auto-decline will help weed them out.

[amcdc79]

When the other ebay competitor gated their CD, LP, music category, most of the sellers came here, which may explain why there is so much competition and lower prices than before.

I took Rose's advise, and tried it on my Dreamcast banner, and low and behold it has worked. Sales have improved, yes I have had a few low ballers, but most are ready to haggle. I have raised my price over the years, so selling it for less than my listed price is no big deal.

I would not use BO for low priced items, if I had a store I would put a limited sale on every now and then. 

You are not alone regarding your sales, many of us are in the same boat, When I first started selling in my main category, there were only ~2,000 listings, now over 12,000 listings. It is getting tougher every year, the next generation do not collect as much as the boomers or their parents did.

The latest homes on HGTV look nice, but don't look like they are lived in, just imho.

End of rant,

Good luck

[momcqueen]

“If bottom feeders are a concern, auto-decline will help weed them out.”

Yes, however, auto-decline doesn’t prevent those users who’ve been rejected from sending irate and unsolicited messages whereby they lodge a complaint the item isn’t worth that, shipping is too high, or that the seller is greedy or reality-challenged. Bottom-feeder is too kind a term for those users.

[weaversofspeech]

Personally I will not Use Best Offer

I sell offline at Antique /Nostalgia shows, markets etc and get enough low balling from some there.  (got to say though the majority of folk are great) Don't need to have folk from a larger geographical area doing it here

I occasionally get people writing me to ask for lower prices  but the majority accept I don't do this here

Last nasty one was a guy who asked for a lower price was very polite in his correspondence with me at first

asked and said he would understand if I refused the offer.  Next email he sent was far from polite or understanding.  I Should have framed it and put it above my puter

basically told me (with expletives) I did not know what I was doing had no concept of prices etc and said I was on the world's largest online selling site. If it did not sell here I would never sell it

Relisted it a few weeks later at a higher price and it sold 

got to love those type of folk 

I don't get to concerned if good items don't sell here at first. I will wait awhile and relist or offer it offline

not everything sells but if it's a good piece it usually is worth the wait and just because a few try to low ball there are those that won't and will purchase

weavers

[rosscd57]

I don't like: Best Offer for a couple of reasons:

1.  It tells the buyer you are not serious about your price and will take less

2.  The buyer may also figure that perhaps you upped the value of your item so you can accept a lower offer.

I pretty much only use: Buy it Now - when selling or buying. I don't much like free shipping either because as everyone really knows, there is no such thing as free shipping. I want to know what the item will cost me and what I am going to pay for shipping. With free shipping you could actually be paying more for the shipping than the actually cost - cause ya don't know what the shipping cost is.

[travis7s]

I used to put it on everything but now I rarely use it. The only thing I truly liked about it was once in a while somebody would just "buy it now" without making an offer on my inflated price.