Interesting article on eBay offer negotiations

[Lobo Aullando]

Personally, I don't recall seeing it a decade ago. I have an increasingly bad case of Internet Brain, though.

Originally Posted by jayshum

Was auto-rejection available in 2012/13 when this data was from?

The study does use another dataset from 2020-23*:

The preexisting data from eBay indicate that most sellers (62%) do not use automatic thresholds. In the subset of data that we analyzed, 17% used only rejection thresholds, 5.4% used only acceptance thresholds, and 15.7% used both thresholds. To examine the effect of seller experience on automatic threshold use, we looked at the number of best-offer listings created by each seller (dating back to 2008). The relation between seller experience and threshold usage was quadratic—both inexperienced and highly experienced sellers used thresholds more than medium-experience sellers. While these results do not rule out that sellers have plans, the low rate of automatic thresholds suggests that sellers prefer to evaluate offers as they arrive.

I guess a lot of folks have the patience to deal with people who offer 30% of current market.


* - On a re-read, there's yet another dataset, and the quote doesn't relate to the 2020-23 one.