Breaking News: eBay Improving Best Offers
Robert Tomkinson @ eBay announced today that they will be providing more improvements to Best Offers in eBay Motors soon. Usually these changes are a precursor to rollout across a broader set of categories.
eBay’s Developer Program blog (if you don’t read it already, and you’re interested in eBay, then it might be up your alley) announced some of this a little while back.
Let’s review the changes he mentions.
Counter-Offer - This new option will let sellers respond directly to a Best Offer either by accepting the offer, or by making a counter-offer. The buyer can then accept the counter-offer, which will close the listing, or respond back with a new offer price.
From the buyer perspective, it seems like they can make the offer, and then the seller can either accept that offer or respond with a counter offer. It doesn’t give a sense of exactly what the seller’s options are yet. Luckily, the Developer Program blog gives some more details of how it will work.
Then, in late January, we will also let you indicate an item’s autodecline amount in the AddItem family of calls, and return the value in GetItem and GetSellerList.
This indicates that the counter offers will function almost like a bid-increment in reverse, which is kind of in the eBay spirit and I think sellers will understand. I wonder if there will be a limit on counter-offers. Since they are enabling this in the API, which will open it up for automation, it wouldn’t necessarily cost a seller more time to counter-offer indefinitely if some kind of program were driving it. The only danger of automation is that it’s hard to incorporate the real-time messages posted by the buyer back into your negotiations if your automation is happening at the speed of light. But again, for high ASP items, you tend to automate less and draw out the process more. For lower ASP items, you might migrate towards more automation. Members naturally gravitate to these behaviors after gaining more experience with the functions.
In real-life negotiations, which we are somewhat trying to simulate here, there aren’t any limits to offers and counter-offers. Consider calling someone on the phone. If the seller is interested, you could haggle for hours if you still feel it’s worth your while. Every seller and buyer will have a threshold of time they are willing to spend on a sale before abandoning it. By allowing a fairly high # of counter offers, each seller could tailor this to their own threshold — which might be different depending on the price of the item. If I am selling a $3,000 item, I might be willing to haggle longer if I think I can make the sale, versus, say a $200 item where I might accept 1-2 offers and then cut it off and move on.
Next from eBay:
Improved Offer Management - We’re making it easier for sellers to track new offers, make counter-offers, and manage all offer activity on their Fixed Price listings.
Basically improving their console… He continues:
Best Offer Button on Item Pages - We’re making Best Offer a clearer option for buyers by changing it from a link on the item page to a more noticeable button.
This is another good change for sellers. The next step is to surface this in search. As a buyer, I might be more likely to make an offer on a fixed price item where the seller has flexibility — and this might affect my shopping experience. How so?
Well, I often limit my eBay searches by BIN only. I’m kind of an immediate gratification type guy when buying on eBay. If a buyer is looking to get a deal, they might prefer to go after an item where they know up front that the seller is willing to haggle a little. Of course to accomomdate, sellers raise their prices — and all of this reminds me so much of car buying at this point. Right now fixed price items are “no hassle” pricing.
All cool stuff. Again, can’t wait for this to surface more in other categories….
Incidentally, Mr. Tomkinson is Senior Manager of Marketplace Efficiency at ebay. What a cool title. Is there a corresponding manager of Marketplace Inefficiency? Do these managers have battles with lightsabers? Inquiring minds…
Related posts: eBay Offers: Chance for more innovation?