Welcome to the inaugural episode of our "Feature Spotlight" series. In this series we’ll highlight the unique and interesting features of our platform. Today we’re excited to showcase offers!

A Simple But Powerful Idea

The idea behind offers is simple — we want to help people negotiate the price of the item so that it sells faster. If you’ve ever sold anything secondhand, you know how much of a guess-and-check exercise setting a price can be. Even with algorithms that try their best to suggest the best price based on any number of factors, at the end of the day, an item is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. Even a small difference between the price and what someone is willing to pay for it results in a lost opportunity.

So, instead of leaving a listing to languish because it was priced incorrectly, we introduced offers as a way to open a dialog between sellers and shoppers. The process is simple and efficient, and the result is powerful.

Shoppers Can Initiate Offers

Anyone can initiate an offer to a seller for an item that is listed in one of our marketplaces. It’s a simple process — click the “make offer” button on the listing, make your offer, and send it.

At this point, the seller has a choice to make. If the offer is acceptable, the seller can accept it with a single click and we take care of everything else from there just like any other sale. However, if the offer is too low, the seller can send a counteroffer back to the shopper. Now it’s the shopper’s turn to decide whether to accept the new price or submit another counteroffer. This back-and-forth continues until someone accepts the current offer, someone rejects the current offer, or the offer expires (offers automatically expire after 24 hours).

Sellers Can Too

Sellers can also initiate offers to shoppers. Thanks to our wishlist feature (we’ll talk about wishlists in a future episode), a seller can see how many people have wishlisted a particular listing. Knowing that there is interest in that listing, but realizing that there isn’t enough interest to actually result in a sale, the seller can offer a discount specifically to the shoppers who wishlisted the listing without publicly reducing the listing price.

The first shopper to accept the offer before it expires wins! Shoppers are still able to submit counteroffers in this case. If that happens, we make it easy for the seller to manage the various negotiations that might be simultaneously in play around each listing. We want to make sure that the seller always ends up with the highest price, which can get complicated if the seller tries to manage this process manually.

Offers Are A Win-Win

Allowing people to negotiate privately is far more efficient than forcing sellers to constantly change the price of a listing to encourage a sale, or making shoppers wait in hopes of a price reduction. This mechanism significantly accelerates that process, which results in sellers making more sales and shoppers getting even better deals. That’s why we love offers!

Learn More

If you’re interested in seeing offers in action, or if you’re interested in learning more about our resale platform, please contact us. We’d love to chat!