Thanks for reading and commenting.

There’s a feel that goes along with best offer–I don’t know if you sell vintage like I do, but way back pre-eBay I did baseball card shows and attended antiques shows. There’s a definite give and take involved with offers, a feature I love being brought to the table with online sales.

The only difference is no one is going to dare offer you $250 to on that item in a face to face situation. Anonymity rules online, so you’ve got to do your best not to get upset at the lowball offers–they are inevitable.

But yes, even in the higher price range, let’s say your looking for $2,000 on that item, $1,800 absolute bottom. Well, first I’d outright reject the $250 offer myself, but let’s say you got a more reasonable initial offer of $1,500. Okay, it’s lowball, but this person is likely a real buyer. I’m probably coming back at him with $2,200 first go around–I might even qualify it with a text message of some sort saying how you’d love to work with him, but you can only go this low.

If they want the item they’re likely going to come up, and they might come right into your range of acceptability on the second offer–if they do, you can try to max it out with yet another counter offer, but if they’re not biting, you might have them hooked at a passable price already.

In other words, item marked $2,750, you want $2,000, you’ll take $1,800
Buyer offers $1,500
You counter $2,200
Buyer splits difference, $1,850
You counter $2,000
Sold!

Remember, you want the sale, but anytime there’s any movement to a second offer from a buyer, they likely want the item just as much as you want the sale.

Thanks again, Cliff

I’ve also recently begun contributing to John Lawson’s colderICE blog, which is where any of my “bigger” concepts will likely appear. Going to keep the quicker hitting ideas like this over here though.

Thanks again, Cliff