Best Offer

Here's a link to ebay's description.

http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/cont...t-offer.html

We agree with you: an individual's best offer is his bid. If a seller has a best offer auction, why would anyone want to actually bid on the auction? Since we have proven through our stats that the more bids an auction has, the more bids it will get, I can't see this feature doing anything to improve the seller's position. We won't be using this on any of our auctions.

The only thing I can think of is that ebay was upset at the sales they weren't getting a part of if a seller ended an auction because someone emailed him and made a satisfactory offer. There are many sales that go on off-ebay under these circumstances. I think that ebay figures that, since now the offers will be submitted through them, they will still get their cut. Yet another way to prevent making money without ebay getting their fingers into it.

Actually it's not. I know that we've put some items up for auction that we realized we'd take less for than the starting bid. However, we just revised the auction and changed the opening bid. I think "Best Offer" has the postential to hurt sellers by cutting bids. We have received plenty of emails making offers on our items or making us an offer if an item doesn't sell. The difference is that these transactions took place off of ebay. ebay is trying to get a cut of that business that happens after the auction is over.