Lowball offers

Happens to me too often. I disable the Best Offer option (which is really a shame since I love to haggle) on a lot of my auctions because people low-ball too far. I try not to sell as much as possible these days anyway, but when I do, I certainly don’t want offers at 40-45% of the average sale price. Not to mention these collectibles are going *UP* in value. Not down. I feel your pain!

I could probably go on a ten page rant about ebay constantly making selling on ebay more difficult - with every single update, ALWAYS. The now “make” and offer option is good for international shipping purposes. Because Ebay.com and uk, ca, aus, etc are all different sites - the add to cart option is not compatible with other sites within ebay. When ebay made it to where almost everyone has to immediately pay for items(unless they use cart which is not compatible), internationally combined shipping became a real headache. Unless buyers first go to my store home-front and add to cart from there, any items they find browsing on their site(say ebay.uk) will require immediate and separate payment. Many of my buyers picked up on this quickly and just decided to make offers at the buy now price. This way they can still get a combined invoice. With so many of my buyers being located outside of the US, I now have to make sure that almost every listing has an option to make an offer.

@gary - I can imagine you have received a few very rude message with those offers. Some of the vulgar words and actions expressed to me before has been unreal. Stepping back – your store is high end. I think just about anything with “Pokemon” in the title + a high price will get some goofball’s ridiculous offer. When these people scroll ebay and see something priced so high - they automatically assume the item is overpriced and want to make fun of it, no matter how rare it is in reality. Pokemon is widely seen only as a child’s game. You should see people’s faces when I tell them what I do for a living haha.

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As Rusty says, all the changes or updates eBay makes ALWAYS makes it more difficult for sellers to operate smoothly and in a time effective, cost efficient way. It’s the only reason the giant portion of my business takes place OFF eBay.

It’s really not only the exorbitant fees…it’s the difficulty maintaining margins that’ll produce a profit above minimum wage.

Lets keep all this in mind next time we offer 50 bucks on a 100 dollar item then counter 65.00 to the sellers 70.00 counter.

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Seriously I feel like people don’t understand how hard it is to make a profit off cards. Sometimes you have great finds with low cost or great finds that grade well and are highly desireable. Most of the time the profit margin is low and it’s made even lower by fees, materials and taxes on income.

I find that the bigger items (SR/FA from new sets or big psa 10 items) from my purchase just help close the gap on the cost. It’s the smaller items that push you towards profit. The fees eat you and it’s hard to compete with the envelope shippers for the new items.

I agree that most people don’t want to pay what they themselves would try to sell it at. I find a lot of my psa cards that are listed for 60 to 100 have offers of 10 to 20. PSA doesn’t mean a card is cheaper than the ungraded card.

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some guy is attempting to low ball all of my listings for cards
like two cards I have listed for around £60 ish he offers 18
like

really
lol

I have an item up for $85 or best offer, I get an offer of…wait for it…$30! Like seriously, that’s a third of my BIN price. You can’t reasonably expect me to do negotiate with you if you start off with an offer that terribly low.

That is always frustrating, especially when you price it realistically.

I actually just had someone do the same on a $99, then message me if they could pay $60, which is fair for that item. I then receive a $65 offer from them, and accept, then they asked if I could counter for $60. Once I explained that the $65 offer was already accepted they said they weren’t going to pay…

I also checked their recent feedback left for sellers, and their most recent was a negative that literally read, “ehhh”.

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Set up auto reject for numbers you wouldn’t even enter negotiations over. Ive gotten auto rejects a few times (never for anything that low) but it can be good not to waste time.

That is a good point. However, sometimes I leave a wider range as some people like to negotiate.

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@snap That is a good idea. However I don’t want to auto-reject anyone as I hate that process myself, as it means the seller never even sees that I’m interested in the item. I want to know if someone is interested, but sometimes I can’t help but feel disrespected when someone makes an offer so low.

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I dont like selling cards on buy it now but last year I put up a PSA 9 1st edition neo discovery holo Umbereon and Tyranitar for £75.Got offered £25 for them then the same person offerd £35.Obviously he got told to bolt.Put them up on auction last month and got £32 lol

If I had a card up for $100 and that was a fair price I would think anything under $80 would be a lowball offer.

That’s so annoying.
Why make two different offers at once?
Of course they’d rather accept the higher knowing you’ll pay that.

It can be frustrating, I think we need to try and not take peoples offers personally as they have every right to submit an offer of what they are willing to pay when we select that option.

We also need to be aware that there may be other costs involved. For example an item at 200US. As an international buyer I may submit an offer of $110US which does seem low. By the time the exchange rate kicks in it would be around 145-150AU for myself. If global shipping is the shipping option it gets thrown up to anywhere around $180AU which yes is STILL only 110US but it’s not necessarily an offer made out of disrespect due to the conditions on the other side of the fence.

Yes some people throw ridiculous offers at people which is pure annoyance however not all those that seem ridiculous necessarily are, it depends on personal situation.
Having said that you could just not make an offer at all.

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It was really weird. He first messaged me if $60 was ok, then made an offer for $65 which I accepted, them messaged me again to counter their offer. Hopefully they don’t pay and I can do an unpaid item blockerooskie.

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I usually check their feedback and country first then determine what’s fair.

Many sellers mark items double or triple what their worth then take offers of half which only fools many buyers.
I usually mark items on the low end of what they’re selling for at the time then take no offers. And when I do put an offer on low ballers still offer half just because their use to it cause of the bloated sellers.

i had a funny experience as well, i was selling some trading cards, with a buy it now price of $45 or offer, he offered $35, i counter offered $40, and he countered that with a $45 offer, i thought it must have been a mistake, but i accepted anyway, and he went on to pay me lol

I just made an offer like like this for exactly this reason, conversion rate sucks at the moment!

Best Offer is a must on multiple quantity listings though. And I really hate to see auto-decline set up on these. The only reasonable auto-decline should either be to prevent stupid offers like $1/per on a $15 item or anything below cost (but only if you really are in it for business cause I’ve sold tons of items for less than I paid).
If you have 15 Base Set Caterpies for $3 each, you better let me send you an offer for $15 @ $1/per (example, please ignore price inaccuracy).
It bugs me when people think they can control bulk negotiations like that.

This is quality!

I try not to take low balls on Buy It Now figures personally because I know there are plenty of sellers out there who inflate their prices considerably to encourage offers in the range they’d be willing to accept. If someone low balls (by a lot) relative to the average price - as determined by the sales history - of the card though, I get a bit frustrated.

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I think sometimes it’s just people looking to troll. No way anyone’s dumb enough to offer $1 on an item that’s listed for $200 OBO…

Haven’t had too many lowballers recently but there seems to be no way to avoid them entirely.

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