Top Tips for Making an Offer to Buyers on Ebay

/ ebay

Everyone loves a bargain – 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 don’t want to miss out on the price you deserve for your beloved items! With this thought in mind, we’ve 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 Might a Seller Need to Make Offers on eBay? 

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, that’s 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, you’ll occasionally receive notifications telling you an offer has been made. If you’re happy with this offer from a customer, you can accept it. However, if the offer isn’t what you’re looking for, you can make a counteroffer instead.

A counteroffer is a simple way to respond to the customer’s original offer. Your counteroffer should be more than the customer’s offer and serves as a form of negotiation. You can set the counteroffer to whatever price you’d like between the offer and the current selling price.

If you’ve changed your mind and don’t want to offer a counteroffer, simply decline the customer’s 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 hasn’t sold but there are people watching it (indicating they’re 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 they’re 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. 

It’s a simple marketing strategy – you probably see it all the time in supermarkets and the like. As such, if your product hasn’t sold and you’d 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 you’ll still have to pay eBay’s sellers fees on top! 

How to Make Great Offers on your eBay Listings

If you’re looking to make one of the above types of offers, there are several key things you’ll need to do. As such, we’ve 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, it’s vital to stress here that you always need to know how much you’ve 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 product’s price to go below this, or you’ll immediately be making a loss.

Account for eBay’s Sellers Fees

You’ve worked out now how much your product cost you – but how much will it cost you to process the sale? eBay charges fees on the selling price of products, so you’ll need to account for this to ensure your discounted price doesn’t 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 you’re 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 you’re offering a 10% discount on a £100 product, but shipping is still £10, 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, it’s 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 you’ve 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 won’t lose out significantly. It’s also a round number, which often sounds much more appealing to customers wanting to grasp a saving!

#5 Psychological Pricing – Go Slightly Below the Next Whole Number

If you had a choice of two products – one at £20.50 and one at £19.99, it’s easy to reach for the £19.99 product first. At the outset, it sounds so much cheaper, making it much more appealing in a customer’s opinion. However, in reality, the difference is surprisingly small; this is known as “psychological pricing.”

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 ÂŁ23 product is still ÂŁ20.70. However, a 15% discount on a ÂŁ23 product is ÂŁ19.55. For the sake of just over ÂŁ1, the product suddenly sounds vastly more affordable for customers – making the offer even more exciting! 

Be Responsive!

One of the main draws of special offers is that they’re 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 “Or Best Offer” 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. 

It’s a simple way to automate the offers system as a seller on eBay – allowing you to get on with more important things instead. Plus, it encourages customers to potentially place a higher offer while they’re still excited and “in the moment,” 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 Thoughts 

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 who’ve 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 shouldn’t have to give away your items for less than they’re worth, which is where knowing about making offers on eBay is helpful. 

Luckily, whether you’re making a counteroffer or if you are giving a special offer to watchers, today’s tips may have helped you make more from every eBay listing.