Unable to see accepted best offer price - Good or Bad?

[Spider-Fan]

So, I notice that recently eBay has stopped showing the final sale price when an item is sold to a best offer. Now it just shows the asking price with a line through it and says Best Offer Accepted.

I'm interested to know what people think about this, both buyers and sellers (dealers especially).

I assume that if a seller lists the item as BIN/BO, they are willing to consider selling the item at lower than the asking price. I know that I generally look through a seller's "best offer" auctions to get an idea of what types of offers they have accepted before making an offer myself. Sometimes I end up putting in a lower offer than I was planning, because I see they are taking very lower offers. Other times I don't put in an offer at all, because I can see that what I'm willing to pay is below what they have accepted in the past and I don't want to offend them or waste their time. For me, taking this away means that I'm probably going to have more submitted best offers rejected, because I won't have anything to base my offer on and will probably start lower since you get 3 shots at it.

I also wonder whether or not this is permanent, or if it is just something eBay is trying out. I recall a couple of months ago that eBay was publicly showing the number of 'watchers' for each auction. I thought this was interesting and could work both for and against the seller. If there are a lot of watchers, I'm more likely to do a BIN or put in a bid (or a higher bid). If there are few or no watchers, I might take my chances that the item won't sell and might be relisted at a lower starting price. Anyway... it didn't last long and disappeared after a couple of weeks.

[nera20]

This is really making things difficult to get a price point to trade/sell the cards and it hurts buyers to to figure out what to offer

[t2554]

Change the .com to .ca (I got this from another post on the forums) and you can see it. I wonder how long that will last though.

[Mystafet]

I don't like this one bit...from a buying and selling standpoint. From a selling standpoint, it does make pricing cards a bit rougher, or even estimating what an item might sell for based on recent sales. As a Buyer, I can see what items were listed at or what they sold at Auction at, but that doesn't give me an idea of what to offer if most the sales were BO.

[monkeymcgee]

I don't see how it can help buyers for the reasons listed. It's annoying as a seller too because I tried to price my stuff in line with recent sales to move them, so it increases the guess work needed.

If this is permanent, watch for a premium "service" they'll offer that will allow you to view the actual price.

I have heard there is a crude workaround that could be somewhat useful if there have been several sales. Sort by price and the completed listings will be sorted by the actual sale price. You still can't see what it was, but it will at least give you a top and bottom range (if you're lucky).

[dpwoodford]

The premium service will likely just be Terrapeak; another advantage for those who buy premium access to data.

[Incarnadine]

As has been mention, if you want to see the best offer price log in to ebay.ca then do your search. To see completed auctions just click "advanced" and completed listings are shown, then just click on a sold best offer item and you can see the price.

[Spider-Fan]

I'm pleased to say that I can confirm the .ca trick does work. Thanks for that tip. Of course, that means eBay has only implemented this for the United States (at this time).

Interesting perspective from Monkey & Mystafet - I hadn't considered the impact on seller pricing strategy.

[sdoug76]

Bad, bad and bad.

Not sure ebays logic on this.

[mcguirem13]

I can see the accepted best offer prices on Ebay mobile. Hopefully they don't update their app to stop showing them too.

[baytowntex]

yah they work on ebay mobile and the .ca trick works as well.. im glad that you can see how many watchers are on each buy it now item

[Nicnac]

Originally Posted by sdoug76

Bad, bad and bad.

Not sure ebays logic on this.

Easy. They want to show the higher set price and not a lower price someone night expect to sell the card for in the future. They want a cut of higher prices from future sales.

[Brian Shirk]

Thanks for the tip
I was having trouble pricing some of the cards Im selling.