How eBay Best Offer works, and when to make a lowball offer

The four things a seller can do with your offer

A seller has four ways to answer your offer: accept it, decline it, counter it, or do nothing until it runs out. Three of those four have a clock attached, and those clocks are what give you room to negotiate.

The offer button only exists where the seller switched the feature on. If a listing shows a price and no way to make an offer, there's nothing to open and nothing to ask for. Auctions and fixed price listings behave differently in ways worth knowing before you decide which one to chase, and we went through how eBay's formats actually behave separately.

Once you send a number, the sequence is short:

• You enter an amount and confirm it. An accepted offer ends the negotiation and creates the sale, so the only number worth sending is one you'd pay today.
• The seller accepts, declines, counters, or lets it run out. Which of those you get is partly automated, in a way we cover two sections down.
• A counteroffer hands the decision back to you. You can take it, decline it, or counter again, up to a cap covered further down.
• Nothing happening is a normal outcome. An expired offer is not a verdict on your number, and it is not a rejection you should read anything into.

Offers also travel the other way. eBay's seller-side page describes a seller sending an offer to "the 30 most recent interested buyers (for example, people watching your items)", which is one of the reasons an unsolicited discount lands in your inbox after you watch something.

How long does a seller have to respond to a Best Offer on eBay?

24 hours. eBay's Best Offer help page gives the seller 24 hours to respond, and an offer nobody answers expires at the end of that window. A counteroffer runs on a much longer clock: eBay's counteroffer page gives a counteroffer 96 hours.

Put those two windows next to each other and a Best Offer stops looking like a yes or no question. One offer and one counteroffer can span five days, and four of those days are yours to think in. That's a negotiation, and it's the most useful thing to know about the feature.

What the two clocks change in practice:

• A counteroffer is not urgent. You have up to four days on it. Nothing about a counter needs an answer in the first ten minutes, and the pressure to reply quickly is coming from you, not from eBay.
• Four days is enough time to check the number properly. That gives you time to compare the counter against every other listing of the same thing, which is the work that decides whether the offer was any good. Working out whether an eBay price is good is the harder half of this, and it doesn't have to happen in a hurry.
• The listing ending kills both clocks. If the listing has 6 hours left, your 24 hour response window doesn't extend it. Offers on a listing about to end are a different and much shorter game.
• If you need the item by a date, count backwards from it. A first offer that goes to expiry, a counter, and your reply can eat most of a week before anything ships.

Most people treat an offer as a coin flip they have to resolve right now. It's a window that stays open for days, and the person who knows that is negotiating while the other one is guessing.

Why did my Best Offer get declined one second after I sent it?

Because the seller set an automatic decline floor you can't see, and a machine answered your offer before any person read it.

When a seller adds Best Offer to a listing, eBay lets them set two automatic thresholds: an amount at or above which offers are accepted without the seller ever seeing them, and an amount below which offers are declined the same way. On the page where sellers set this up, eBay is blunt about what buyers see:

Buyers won't know your limits

Quoted from eBay's page on adding Best Offer to a listing.

That one line explains almost every confusing Best Offer experience, and it leaves the speed of the response as the only signal you get:

• An instant decline is not a seller's opinion of your offer. No human saw it. You found the approximate location of the auto-decline floor, and nothing else happened.
• An instant accept means you landed at or above the auto-accept number. That's worth noticing, because it means the seller would have taken less. Fast acceptance is not a compliment.
• A response that takes hours is the informative one. Slow means the automatic thresholds didn't catch your number and a person is deciding. That's the only kind of exchange where a polite message alongside your offer does anything at all.
• You can't solve for the thresholds. They are invisible by design, and probing for them burns offers you only get a few of.

So decide the highest number you will pay before you open the offer box, then work upward from a number you'd be pleased with. An auto-decline costs you an offer. An auto-accept above your true maximum costs you money you never get back.

How many offers can you make on eBay, and can you take one back?

Five offers on most items, and ten in eBay's vehicle categories. That's the cap eBay's Best Offer page states, and it's small enough to plan around instead of spending casually.

The counteroffer limit is less settled, and it's worth saying so plainly. Across eBay's Best Offer and counteroffer pages, the number of counteroffers allowed in one negotiation reads as 5 in one place and 4 in another. Both are eBay's own pages, neither is a third-party summary, and eBay has not published which number is current. We're not going to pick one for you. The safe way to plan is to assume four rounds and never build a strategy that needs a fifth.

eBay's pages above describe two narrow situations where you can take an offer back:

• The listing has 12 or more hours left to run. Offers on listings inside their final 12 hours are effectively committed.
• You sent the offer less than an hour ago. This is the typo escape hatch, and it closes fast.

Outside those two windows, an offer stands until the seller answers it or it expires. Treat a sent offer the way you'd treat a bid: it's a commitment, and not an opening position you can walk back. Bids run on separate and stricter rules, and which bidding mistakes you can undo and which you cannot has its own page.

A listing that has sat for months changes what the seller is comparing you against

Months on the site change what the seller is comparing your offer against. On a listing posted this morning, the seller is weighing your number against the possibility of a full price sale next week. On a listing that has been up since spring, the seller is weighing it against another few months of nothing.

That's also the honest answer to the question people actually ask about Best Offer, which is what percentage to send:

• eBay publishes no guidance on this at all. Nothing in eBay's help pages recommends a percentage, and there's no reliable dataset either.
• The community consensus lands somewhere between 10% and 25% below the asking price. Buyers and sellers report that range to each other in forums and threads. It isn't an eBay figure and it isn't a measurement, so treat it as the shape of normal instead of a rule.
• The listing's age moves that range more than any formula does. A 10% offer on a three month old listing and a 25% offer on a listing posted this morning are not comparable actions, even though one number looks bolder than the other.
• What the seller paid moves it too, and you can't see that. A seller with room in the price can take 25% off and still be ahead. A seller who bought badly can't take 5%. The same percentage is a different offer on two listings at the same price, and nothing on the page tells you which one you're looking at.

The useful input is not a percentage. It's how long the thing has been sitting, which is the one part of this you can actually see before you type a number.

Every result card in our search carries the date the seller listed the item. Inside the first week a badge next to it counts the age in minutes, hours or days. Past a week the badge drops back to the date itself, which for this purpose is the number you want anyway. Search is free, works without an account, and covers eBay US only. What it gives you before you open the offer box is the one fact that actually changes your number: whether the listing went up this morning or last spring.

Three limits on that, because they decide how much weight it carries:

• We can't tell you whether the seller has already dropped the price. Any price history we hold on an item starts the day you add it to a watchlist, and nobody can show you what an eBay listing asked before somebody started recording it. The same is true of every price history tool on eBay, ours included.
• Our deal score compares asking prices, never sold prices. It puts a listing next to what the other listings in the same set of results are asking, and it needs at least five of them before it will label anything. We hold no sold price data, so the label only compares one listing with the others in that same search. If every listing in that search is overpriced, nothing in the score can tell you that.
• There's no sort for oldest first. Our sort options are best match, newly listed, ending soonest, price lowest and price highest. None of them surfaces the listings that have been sitting longest, so the date on the card is the thing to read.

"No reasonable offers refused" only means the offer button is on

The phrase means the seller has switched Best Offer on, and nothing beyond that. If they also set an automatic decline floor, "reasonable" is whatever sits above a number you can't see. The phrase is listing copy, not an eBay setting, and it changes nothing about how the listing behaves.

Before you read anything into it:

• The words cost the seller nothing. Any seller can type them, including one whose auto-decline floor sits at 5% under the asking price.
• They don't move the thresholds. A listing with the phrase and a listing without it both answer your offer the same way, through the same invisible pair of numbers.
• They are not evidence of a motivated seller. All the phrase reliably tells you is that offers are enabled, which the offer button already told you.

If you want to know whether a seller is flexible, the listing's age is better evidence than its adjectives. A listing that has been up for four months with the offer button on has already declined or ignored whatever offers came in, and it's still sitting there.

A Best Offer is not a question you ask once and get an answer to. It's a clock you start, and the only two things you control are the number you send and the moment you send it. Getting the number roughly right and the moment properly right beats getting the number perfect and the moment wrong.