eBay's Best Offer Feature: Accept, Counter, or Ignore

How Best Offer actually works

Turning it on adds a simple option to a listing: instead of only a fixed Buy It Now price, a buyer can send a lower figure they would actually pay. eBay's own help page describes the response window plainly - "you have 24 hours to choose how to respond" - accept it outright, decline it, send back a counter-offer of your own, or simply let it run out. See eBay's own help page on adding Best Offer to a listing, checked 26 September 2026. A buyer who does not like your counter can come back with another offer of their own, back and forth, until one side accepts, declines, or the whole exchange simply times out.

Most items allow up to three offers per buyer on a single listing (ten in most Motors categories), so this is not an unlimited back-and-forth - a buyer who has already sent three offers that went nowhere cannot keep trying indefinitely on the same item.

Auto-accept and auto-decline: the two numbers doing the real work

Set an auto-accept price and any single offer that meets or beats it is taken instantly by eBay on your behalf, with no chance for you to reconsider once it happens. Set an auto-decline price and anything below it is refused automatically, freeing you from having to manually reject every lowball offer that comes in. Between those two figures sits a middle band that genuinely needs a human decision - too narrow a band and you are back to manually handling almost everything; too wide a band and you risk auto-accepting something that, on reflection, you would rather have countered.

Buyers never see either threshold. All they see is whether their offer was accepted, declined, or is still pending - the numbers themselves are yours alone to set, and worth setting deliberately rather than leaving at whatever eBay suggests by default.

Why the auto-accept number is a commitment, not a suggestion

An accepted Best Offer, automatic or not, creates the same obligation as a Buy It Now sale at that price - both sides are expected to go through with it. That makes the auto-accept threshold a genuinely different kind of number from a price you can quietly change your mind about: the moment a matching offer arrives, the sale is made, at that price, whether or not it still feels right an hour later. Setting it without checking the real margin it protects is how a seller ends up committed to selling something at a loss the instant the wrong offer lands, with no manual step in between to catch it.

eBay's final value fee is charged on whatever the item actually sells for, an accepted offer included, calculated the same way it would be on a full-price sale - so the fee itself does not change the arithmetic, but it does mean the fee comes off a smaller number than the listed price, on top of whatever discount the offer itself represents.

Setting thresholds against a real number, not a guess

The auto-decline price should be set at the lowest figure that still clears your actual target return once eBay's fees are worked out on that lower price - the same worked-out number a fixed listing price is built from, not a round figure picked because it looks reasonable. Working from the real fee structure at a specific proposed price tells you exactly what a given offer would actually leave you, before deciding whether that number belongs above or below your decline threshold.

A worked example: setting the two thresholds properly

Take an item listed at £120, costing £70 in total once delivery is added, with a target return of 25% on spend built into that £120 figure. Work out what a lower price would actually leave after eBay's fees at that lower figure specifically, not just eBay's fees on the original £120 - a common shortcut that quietly overstates what a discounted sale really keeps. Suppose £104 is the lowest price that still clears the same 25% target once fees are recalculated at that figure: £104 is the honest auto-decline threshold, not a rounder number chosen because it looks reasonable next to £120. The auto-accept threshold sits above that, at whatever price is genuinely good enough to take immediately without a second thought - perhaps £112, leaving a comfortable middle band between £104 and £112 for offers that deserve an actual look rather than an instant answer either way.

Getting this wrong in the generous direction is the costlier mistake: an auto-decline set too high turns away offers that would have been genuinely profitable, while an auto-accept set too low commits to a sale before there was ever a chance to reconsider it.

When Best Offer is not worth turning on at all

A product with almost no margin to give away is a poor candidate for it - if the gap between the listed price and the true break-even point is already thin, there is no meaningful room for a threshold band that means anything, and the feature adds a way to lose money rather than a way to close more sales. A brand new listing with no history yet is also a weaker case for turning it on immediately: a first week or two rarely tells you enough to know whether a listing needs a price incentive to sell, or whether it would have sold at the full price anyway once it was actually found.

The underused half of the feature: sending offers yourself

Best Offer is not only something to wait for. A seller can proactively send an offer out to buyers who have already shown interest - watching the listing, or adding it to their basket - without waiting for them to ask first. eBay sends these to the 30 most recent interested buyers, and if more than 30 people are interested, further batches of up to 30 go out every 48 hours. Each offer stays valid for 96 hours or until the item sells, whichever comes first.

This is worth using deliberately on a listing that is picking up watchers but not converting - the exact situation a weak sell-through rate points at without saying why. A small, proactive discount offered directly to people who have already shown real interest can be the nudge that turns a watcher into a sale, on exactly the listings where it is most likely to actually work.

The connection to Promoted Listings that catches people out

If the listing is also running a Promoted Listings general campaign, accepting an offer can carry the ad fee too, on top of the discount already given. The same 30-day, any-buyer attribution window covered here still applies: if anyone clicked the promoted ad within the last 30 days and the item was still being promoted, accepting the offer can attribute that sale to the ad, at whatever ad rate is live at the moment of acceptance - not the rate on the day of the click. eBay's own Manage Offers page actually shows this before a decision is made, naming whether a click happened in the last 30 days and what the ad rate would be. That is worth checking before accepting a borderline offer on a promoted listing specifically, since it can turn what looked like an acceptable discount into a smaller real margin once the ad fee lands on top of it.

The mistakes worth avoiding

• Setting auto-accept from the listed price alone, without checking what that price actually leaves after eBay's fees at the lower, accepted figure.
• Leaving the middle band so wide that almost every offer needs a manual decision, defeating the point of automating the routine ones.
• Forgetting Best Offer is on, on a listing where the price has since been changed for another reason - old thresholds do not update themselves just because the list price did.
• Never using the send-offers side of the feature at all, leaving a real tool for converting existing interest completely unused.

Where this stays a seller's own call

Working out what a specific offer, or a specific auto-decline threshold, actually leaves after every fee is exactly what Sellhelm's pricing is built to answer quickly. Deciding where to actually set that threshold for a given product - how much margin to trade for a faster sale, and on which listings sending proactive offers is worth the effort - stays a judgement about that specific product and that specific buyer interest, not something a formula should decide the same way for everything in a catalogue.

Questions people ask