Ebay Best offer Part 2: A Seller's Best Friend.

In the first part of this blog, I gave a lot of reason's why Best Offer can be a great thing for buyers purchasing sets on Ebay. However, it is also a great tool for a seller as well. Auctions are definitely a really good way to sell items, but if you want to go with Buy It Now for any reason ( and there are advantages to Buy it Now), I recommend using Best Offer as well.

A lot of seller's avoid Best Offer for many reasons:

• They don't want to deal with low-ball offers.
• The don't want to spend the time responding to offers.
• You may feel people wont hit Buy it Now because Best Offer is there.

While these are understandable concerns, there are a lot of pluses to using this feature when selling.

1. Best Offer attracts more buyers to consider your item

Whether your price is fair or not, having a Best Offer puts it in range for more buyers price wise whether you will actually accept their price or not. Yes, this means you may spend more time replying to offers, but if you really want to sell your item, this can only be a good thing.

A buyer may only want to pay $110 for your $125 item because that’s all they have, and they wouldn't even look at your item otherwise. After looking, maybe they decide they can spend $125 on it, or they at least watch it until they can. Otherwise they may have just passed right on by it.

As well, when searching through items, Best Offer has its own logo which makes it stand out over top of the price when someone is mindlessly searching through Buy it Now items. This means someone may at least read your title or actually click into your listing. I find that items I list for Best Offer get more hits than a normal Buy it Now.

2. You can actually get more money for your item in some cases.

How is that? Well, if you are patient and just want the best price for your item, list it a little high, but give impeccable details and pictures and chances are someone will eventually send you an offer. Now you are in a negotiation. I sometimes find after a counteroffer or two, a buyer may offer me more than I actually wanted to get for an item in the first place.

Just as I mentioned in the last article, the buyer is bound by what they offer. If they offer you a better than fair price, they are stuck with it and it's your gain.

3. If you are selling bulk, you can sell it faster.

In part one, I mentioned how this was an advantage to the buyer. It has its advantages to the seller (as I mentioned in the article as well) too. For one, you might be able to sell all of them to one person which means lower shipping and less shipping hassle writing down all the different addresses.

On top of that – BAM! Your listing is done. Yes, you may have taken a little less money, but its quick money in your pocket which is sometimes worth a little more long term money.

A few extra tips using these suggestions:

• If you use number 2, make sure your price isn't two high. Sometimes I do this and so I regularly check the listings views in “My Ebay” to make sure that people are looking at it. If not I lower the price.
• Be prepared for some low-ballers. The great thing is you aren't required to respond to an offer. So if you really don't have time, you have 48 hours or it will just magically expire.
• In my experience, avoid using the auto decline features. I touched on this in part 1 where this sometimes shows a buyer you aren't really committed to the Best Offer. More importantly, this wastes one of the sellers offers if they get declined. What if at the end, their next offer would have been your lowest acceptance. I would much rather see all their offers.
• Also avoid using auto-accept unless its a very small percentage off. If you do, a seller may offer the lowest you put you would auto accept, but they were willing to go higher. You could lose money you would have made!

Try a few of these out and report your successes in the comments.

Note: All of the information here are my own opinions and are pulled from my experiences. You may or may not have success with these methods.