Whats with e-haggle lately?? (e-bay haggling tips)

e-bay is sort of a strange place to do business. As a young business starting out, it is a good place to bump up your sales a little. It is also a good place to determine pricing for online products. You can dump a couple of unknown products up there and see where the auctions come out. It is a good way to determine demand. It is also a good way to see where your markets are. For example, Californians are usually willing to pay more for a product because everything is so un-Godly expensive there that no matter what you throw out seems like a deal. Brazilians, will pay crazy amounts for shipping as long as the deal on the product is good. (both of these incidentally have to do with tax structure in those locations)

At any rate, while the fees associated with e-bay make your profits a little less, you do reach a large audience quickly. Sometimes I laugh about my e-bay store because to account for e-bay fees, many of my products sell for more than I have them listed at in my normal online store. I guess e-bay gives people the feeling of shopping around without actually having to shop around.

All of this is beside the point of this post. What I don't get is that it seems like e-bay is slowly turning into e-haggle. With the original auction format, there was no haggling, if you won, you won, if not you had to try again. The online stores and "buy it now" pricing made things a little easier for people who needed a part quickly, but removed the feeling of being able to "work the system" and get a good deal. So people have started haggling.

Haggling is fine, except that when you run a business that is focused on value and volume (that is selling with low margins at high volume) you don't have a lot of room to haggle, and in addition you don't have a lot of time to go back and forth with people who just don't get it. You would not believe the hours I have spent going back and forth with people over the prices on stuff, and the more time I spend on it, the more profit I would have to make to make it worth my while.

So if you want to haggle on e-bay here are some things to remember.
#1 You are more likely to have a successful "haggle" when the seller has their "accepts best offers" option on. Those are the sellers who are openly willing to haggle. All of the others probably will haggle, but don't really want to. They just want to take orders and go about their day.

#2 Don't be afraid to ask, but learn to take a hint. - My favorite e-mail to get, for whatever reason usually comes internationally, and looks something like this. "I see you have a screwdriver for sale... Can you quote me a price for a screwdriver, a hammer, a saw-zaw, and a jackhammer? I need it shipped to France". There have been times when I happen to have all of their list, so I quote them a price, and sometimes we go forward. Sometimes (usually) most of the stuff is special order. So here is the tip. If you are trying to get someone to special order stuff for you, don't haggle quite so hard, you are more apt to kill the whole deal. Someone who is ordering up something specifically for you will rarely have the same price as someone who has a bunch in stock and needs to blow them out. If they can get you stuff and save you some cash by combining shipping, its a good deal don't push them, because you are at a disadvantage that you may not know about... Your approach is the same as what a lot of scam artists use. They order a large volume of stuff that is not normal stock for you so they can draw you to a transaction that is outside of the e-bay system (which is illegal by the way) and then find a way to screw you. So if someone is willing to work with you a little an order stuff up, either take the prices they give you or don't. Don't come back at them with "well ScrewdriversRus has the driver for $2, and theJackMan has the jackhammer at $78, can't you come down a little on those items? No, go ahead and place three orders and get your deal that way.

#3 They are looking at your feedback - Don't try to haggle if you have a feedback score that is negative. No one wants to take that risk. Generally speaking, I don't negotiate at all with anyone who has a feedback score less than 10 who has negative feedback. If they have a feedback score over 5 and it is all positive, I might talk to you. Honestly though, it is hard to get negative feedback, you have something go really wrong with a transaction. Chances are if you have done 5 transactions of e-bay and two of them got you negative feedback, you are doing something wrong and no one wants to mess with you.

#4 The 3 e-mail rule - You should probably be able to work everything out in 3 e-mails or less. If you are sending your 4th e-mail because you aren't getting the deal you want, you aren't going to get the deal you want, try someone else or take whatever offer you have. The 4th e-mail is just ticking the seller off. The exception to this is if you are getting such a good deal that you want to increase your order. I recently worked a deal with a guy that went over the 3 e-mail rule because he worked a deal that he liked, and then went and got some of his friends in on it and came back at me with bigger numbers. I was okay with that and ended up shipping 20 sets of brake pads to Germany.

#5 Finally keep in mind that most online sellers don't want to haggle. They have essentially already done all of their haggling by comparing their prices to other online dealers and pricing their products accordingly. Be nice and they may hook you up, otherwise you are using more of their time so they can earn less money which will make them less apt to deal with a person who just doesn't get it.