This ezine is published once a week.
December 20, 2007 Volume III, Issue 48

'Use eBay's Best Offer Feature to your Advantage'
by Lynn A. Dralle, 'The Queen of Auctions'

I realize that this doesn't have anything to do with our feature article, but I just had to share this before getting started on my writing. My mom and I were at a garage sale recently and you know I always buy coffee mugs if they have a great theme, good signature or good maker's mark.

I was a little burned out (it was late in the morning) and my mom pulled out a "Diet Coke" coffee mug from a box on the ground. She said "You need this." Well, I do drink a lot of Diet Coke but not out of a coffee mug and I don't drink coffee so I didn't really see the point. I wasn't going to buy it, but then I saw two very saleable Lucy and Me (Enesco) coffee mugs so I made sure my mom didn't want the diet coke one and I threw it in with my pile. You see the mugs were 25 cents each so I wanted to buy four to make it an even dollar.

Well, guess what? As of this writing, the "Lucy and Me" mugs have NO bids and the Diet Coke mug is going nuts. Click here to see what it eventually sold for. It may be because I put advertising in the title. I don't really know, but eBay is continually surprising me and making me very happy!! Which leads me to a feature that I have started using within the past year that is also making me very happy--the "Best Offer" option.

I haven't been very happy with the new eBay Markdown Manager, and I haven't been happy with second chance offers either; but this past Fall, I decided to give the Best Offer feature a whirl.

It is funny, but I was actually sitting at my desk waiting to be interviewed by Griff and Lee. Click here to listen to one of the archived interviews. I still get a little nervous before each of these interviews so I decided to do a little eBay work to keep my mind off of it. There wasn't enough time to do any serious listing, so I started looking at my eBay store and focused on my higher priced items that weren't selling.

I started at the top and began revising any listing that I wasn't firm on for the pricing. I worked my way down the list until I got to the $99 items. Here is an example of how Best Offer works.

1) Click on your item or input the item number. 2) Click on "Revise Your Listing". FYI, you can only use Best Offer on fixed price listings (so anything that you have in your eBay Store is a candidate or anything at auction with a fixed price).

Once the "Revise your Listing" page comes up, just scroll down to the yellow heading that says "Choose How You'd Like to Sell." Click on the box that says "Allow buyers to send you their best offer." Once you do that, a screen like the one shown below will appear.

Now, you have three options:

#1: Let all offers come to you and you make a decision on a case by case basis. To choose this option, do not check either of the two boxes shown above. You can see on your "My eBay" page where eBay will tell you if you have any best offers.

#2: "Automatically accept offers of at least" a certain price. To use this option you will check that first box and input the least amount you will take.

#3: Finally, you can check the box that says "Automatically Decline Offers of less than" and you input your price.

I always choose the third option and I will explain why. If you choose the first option, you will be wading through a lot of offers that you already know that you won't accept. If you choose the second option, you may leave money on the table. Let me show you this with an example.

My mom decided to sell a cranberry Mary Gregory pitcher that had belonged to my Grandmother. We priced it at $499 and it didn't sell for over a year. We finally added the "Allow Best Offer" feature this summer. We said to automatically decline offers of less than $399. If we had said to automatically accept offers of at least $399, we may have only gotten $399 for it. The lady who ended up buying it input an offer of $450. It was so close to our asking price that we immediately took it.

Here is a tip. Try and put in odd numbers for the decline amount. For example, for the elephant that you saw pictured above, I said to decline anything less than $74. I do this because I believe that people will offer amounts like $25, $50, $75, $100 etc. The lady that bought the elephant obviously kept trying in dollar increments until her offer wasn't automatically declined.

She offered me the very least I was willing to consider. Now, at this point I could have countered, but let me tell you, I was so glad to be done tripping over that "white elephant" (well he is actually brown) in the eBay room that I was happy to take her offer!

Here is another example of an item that we recently sold. It was a figural Victorian toothpick holder. My minimum amount to decline was $74.00. Click here to see what it ended up selling for

Click here to see what it ended up selling for.
You will see the best offer price under my original asking price.

My plan before the holidays was to get through my entire store list to the $49.99 price points and add "Best Offers" on those items that I am willing to deal on. However, I didn't get past all of my $99 items-I actually only added that feature to about 20 items. AND Look, I sold two of those in the past two weeks. So, I highly recommend that you do this to some of your slow moving merchandise also.

Here's to a very successful 2008 on eBay and off!

Happy eBaying!