Everyone loves a bargain โ and with this thought in mind, your customers may have considered placing an offer on your current eBay listings rather than paying the full price. However, while making offers on eBay can be a hugely exciting experience and could bag your customers an excellent bargain, it may not always be as great for you. After all, as a seller, you donโt want to miss out on the price you deserve for your beloved items! With this thought in mind, weโve outlined some key tips for making counteroffers to buyers on eBay. Hopefully, this will make it easier for you to place an offer successfully.
We’ll cover:
- Why offers are needed and the types of offers available.
- Tips for making ebay offers
- How to make more sales (Secret tip)
Why Might a Seller Need to Make Offers on eBay?ย
First of all ,we should consider when making offers on eBay might apply to sellers. Generally speaking, we assume that making offers on eBay is exclusive for buyers looking to bag a bargain. However, thatโs not wholly the case. In fact, as a seller on eBay, you can also make offers. There are two primary types of offers you can make.
Offering and Counteroffering on Listings
The most common for many sellers on eBay is making a counteroffer. If you have allowed offers on your eBay listing, youโll occasionally receive notifications telling you an offer has been made. If youโre happy with this offer from a customer, you can accept it. However, if the offer isnโt what youโre looking for, you can make a counteroffer instead.
A counteroffer is a simple way to respond to the customerโs original offer. Your counteroffer should be more than the customerโs offer and serves as a form of negotiation. You can set the counteroffer to whatever price youโd like between the offer and the current selling price.
If youโve changed your mind and donโt want to offer a counteroffer, simply decline the customerโs offer and wait for new opportunities to come through.
Offering a Discount to Watchers on the Product
Another type of offer you could make as an eBay seller is to offer a discount. If your item hasnโt sold but there are people watching it (indicating theyโre interested in the product), you can offer them a discount to entice them to buy.
Many of us absolutely love getting discounts. These can be a great way to save money, and when theyโre also time-limited, they can become exceptionally appealing. With this thought in mind, many eBay sellers include discounts on their products if they want to encourage customers to buy who may have otherwise been on the fence.
Itโs a simple marketing strategy โ you probably see it all the time in supermarkets and the like. As such, if your product hasnโt sold and youโd like to increase interest in it, you could always make an offer for a reduced price to see if customers will take advantage of the discount. Just be sure you can afford the discount, and youโll still have to pay eBayโs sellers fees on top!
How to Make Great Offers on your eBay Listings
If youโre looking to make one of the above types of offers, there are several key things youโll need to do. As such, weโve outlined six simple steps to make a great offer on your eBay listings as follows. You might just find that this massively increases the demand for your products or items!
Work Out the Cost of Production or Purchase
Before you go any further, itโs vital to stress here that you always need to know how much youโve invested in a product before offering a discount. While loss leader strategies can be a common way to break into an existing market, this will cost your business significantly.
As such, if you still want to make money on the sale after the discount has been factored in, starting with the cost of production or purchase is crucial. Work out how much you spent on buying or making the item; your discount should never allow the productโs price to go below this, or youโll immediately be making a loss.
Account for eBayโs Sellers Fees
Youโve worked out now how much your product cost you โ but how much will it cost you to process the sale? eBay charges fees on the selling price of products, so youโll need to account for this to ensure your discounted price doesnโt leave you in the red.
In short: your offered price should always be more than the combined cost of selling fees and production/purchasing fees. The only exception, as before, is if youโre taking a loss-leader approach to break into the market with unsustainably generous promotions.
Consider Shipping Costs
Sometimes, the appeal of a special offer can be overruled by the cost of shipping. For example, if youโre offering a 10% discount on a ยฃ100 product, but shipping is still ยฃ10, the total purchase and delivery price will still be the same as the original price to buy the item.
This can be a significant issue for many customers and could leave them refusing to buy your products. Often, itโs better to slash the shipping costs and only use lower promotions on the purchase price than the other way around.
Set a Discount Rate
Now that youโve considered the costs of your product, you can set a rate for your discount. You should always start relatively small rather than going all out with a massive discount. Around 10% is often a good discount amount; this is substantial enough to entice customers while remaining small enough that you wonโt lose out significantly. Itโs also a round number, which often sounds much more appealing to customers wanting to grasp a saving!
#5 Psychological Pricing โ Go Slightly Below the Next Whole Number
If you had a choice of two products โ one at ยฃ20.50 and one at ยฃ19.99, itโs easy to reach for the ยฃ19.99 product first. At the outset, it sounds so much cheaper, making it much more appealing in a customerโs opinion. However, in reality, the difference is surprisingly small; this is known as โpsychological pricing.โ
Try to go slightly below the next whole number when creating an offer to make your products seem more appealing. For example, a 10% discount on a ยฃ23 product is still ยฃ20.70. However, a 15% discount on a ยฃ23 product is ยฃ19.55. For the sake of just over ยฃ1, the product suddenly sounds vastly more affordable for customers โ making the offer even more exciting!
Be Responsive!
One of the main draws of special offers is that theyโre usually time-limited, which makes them incredibly exciting. As such, you should always try to respond quickly if you get any requests, offers, or orders through your discount to ensure that the customer remains interested in the product rather than losing interest as time drags on to hear back from you.
Automate Best Offer Settings
As a further point of note, did you know that you can automatically automate your โOr Best Offerโ settings to accept if the customer gives a suitable offer? When allowing these types of offers on your product listing, your customer will get an immediate response to their offer, preventing you from having to sort through countless lowball offers manually.
Itโs a simple way to automate the offers system as a seller on eBay โ allowing you to get on with more important things instead. Plus, it encourages customers to potentially place a higher offer while theyโre still excited and โin the moment,โ increasing your chances of making an extra sale.
The Secret to Making more Sales
You can sell items faster without doing any extra work on your part. How is this possible?
You do this by using a crosslisting app. It’s what all the best ebay sellers are doing and you better believe it works!
SellerAider’s crosslisting app allows you to automatically post your inventory to different marketplaces in a few clicks. This is a big different than the usual manual copy/pasting most sellers think of when they hear the word “crosslisting”. You can start using this to branch out to other marketplaces like: mercari, depop, etsy and a whole lot more.
This is a no-brainer to sell your inventory faster!
Final Thoughtsย
Without a doubt, making offers on eBay is more complex than just filling in a random price and hoping for the best. After all, in many cases, buyers whoโve placed an offer on your eBay listing are looking for a great price, and they may not buy if you refuse to haggle. However, you shouldnโt have to give away your items for less than theyโre worth, which is where knowing about making offers on eBay is helpful.
Luckily, whether youโre making a counteroffer or if you are giving a special offer to watchers, todayโs tips may have helped you make more from every eBay listing.